SUNlite

Shedding some light on UFOlogy and UFOs

Volume 4 Number 3 May-June 2012


Have fun storming the castle!
N ormally, I ignore some of the com-
ments directed my way but a recent
article that was written by Stanton Fried-
man deserves a response. Because he
referred to me as “ignorant” and made
some claims that were not quite accu-
rate, I felt it necessary to write a rebuttal
to his accusations and name-calling.
Over the past few months, I have received
several private e-mails pointing out this
article and other UFOlogical rants about
what I have written. One individual re-
ferred to my journey to the “dark side” be-
ing complete when I received such pub-
lic notice from prominent UFOlogists.
Should I start signing my name “Darth
debunker”?
Speaking of e-mails, I have no problem
discussing various issues and sharing
information with others even if a person
chooses to remain nameless. However,
when the exchange gets long and be-
comes full of accusations by somebody
who does not have the courage to sign
their name, I lose patience. I had to re-
cently ask an individual to present their
identification or stop bothering me in
this manner. That was the last I heard
from them.
This issue has some articles by Rog-
er Paquay and Marty Kottmeyer. Mr.
Paquay’s article compliments what I
wrote about the Belgian F-16 intercep-
tion case on March 30-31, 1990. Martin’s
extensive articles are interesting to say
the least and covers the interesting idea
of individuals ascending into UFOs like
religious prophets from the bible.
The SUNlite index is now on the web. I
basically gave two indices. One is by is-
sue and the other is by topic. Hopefully, it
will be helpful those looking for specific
articles. I will try and keep it up to date. It
is in PDF and html format.
Recently, I have received some feedback
regarding SUNlite’s layout. I started with
the three column format because that is
what the template for my software gave
me. I liked the look so did not change
it. However, the comment is that it is
not very well suited for internet readers.
Looking at it, I realize they are probably
correct and in SUNlite 4-4, I will begin to
use just one column per page.
1
Cover: A Microsoft X image of an F-16 flying over Belgium on March
30/31, 1990. I know it is not a Belgian F-16A but it is adequate for
my purposes.
Left: UFOlogists seem to be gathering together to storm the evil de-
bunker’s castle. They don’t look happy. One wonders why they are so
concerned about what debunkers say if their research was solid.
Another idea put forward was that I
should create a SUNlite blog. In my first
issue, I mentioned this but I feared it
would fail because I would not devote
enough attention to it. With a regular
newsletter, I have a deadline to meet and
it forces me to produce regularly It also
gives me time to evaluate my initial drafts
and attempt to be objective. A blog is an
interesting idea but I just don’t see it any-
time in the near future.
Because of family commitments, the
next issue of SUNlite (4-4 - July-August)
will probably be out late. I expect it to be
done between July 1 and the 15th.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Who’s blogging UFOs..................................2-3
The Roswell Corner .......................................4
The coming of the trian-
gles......................................4
March 30-31, 1990 - the Belgium F-16
UFO chase...................................................5-9
The evening of 30 March 1990: Ob-
servations by the F16s by Roger Pa
quay....................................................10-15
The king of planets and queen of UFOs
meet....................................................15
It is Elijah the tishbite! Fired up by
that ol’ Hairy Baal-buster by Martin
Kottmeyer.......................................16-19
Ascension UFO-style by Martin Kott-
meyer................................................19-29
RB-47update.......................................29
Another empty water pistol?.......30-35
Did a meteor really stop a car?....36-38
Fireball=UFO crash.......................................38
Experienced Amateur Astrono-
mer photographs UFO?..................38
Flying Saucer Fiziks II..............................39-43
NASA produces some UFO reports....43
UFOs on the tube..........................................44
Buy it, borrow it, bin it.................................44
There recently were some interesting
documents posted on the internet:
Isaac Koi recently posted Dr. Willy
Smith’s book, “Pilots and UFOs”, on
line.
The UFO Iconoclast(s) blog posted a
link to an interview that Peter Gersten
and Dr. Hynek did with Tom
Snyder in the 80s.
Dr. Dil posted James Easton’s
“Resolving Rendlesham” ar-
ticle, which has been sorely
missed from the internet.
Thanks to Steve Johnson, the
two years of UFO data maga-
zine (16 issues) is available
for download.
I suggest the reader follow the
links. They are all worth read-
ing/viewing.
Robert Sheaffer documented the 21st
international UFO congress from a
skeptic’s point of view (this link is for
the first of five postings he made). It
was interesting to say the least. Some
of the speakers seem to have been sub-
standard. The only “heavy hitter” was Dr.
Bruce Maccabee but he backed out at the
last minute. He was replaced by Stan Ro-
manek. Boy....is that a downgrade.
Frank Warren promoted the Arizona
UFO case with all sorts of one-sided
stories and appeals for believing the
witnesses to the event. Strangely miss-
ing in this wealth of witness reports
are the ones that mattered. I did not
see Mitch Stanley or the other witnesses
who saw the lights as just a formation of
lights mentioned. Apparently Frank War-
ren is practicing what Stanton Friedman
refers to as a rule for debunkers, “What
the public doesn’t know, I am not going to
tell them”. I suggest readers interested in
the Arizona 1997 case refer to my article
in SUNlite 2-3.
The UFO Iconoclasts pointed towards
recent new revelations regarding the
Aztec UFO crash. This case seems to nev-
er go away. What was considered a hoax
in the 1950s has gotten legs because of
its bigger brother down in Roswell. Aztec
is a good example of my belief that there
Who’s blogging
UFOs?
Hot topics and varied opinions
is not a single prominent UFO case that
can be explained, to the satisfaction of all
UFOlogists. There will always be the mi-
nority that will find some reason to reject
an explanation, no matter how good, in
order to promote the case as something
extraordinary for personal gain.
Tim Hebert presented a recap of the
Echo flight shutdown story that you
won’t ever read on Robert Hastings
web site or those blogs that tend to
promote his views. I guess it is easier to
put your hands over your ears and eyes
and proclaim that you are not listening/
reading than to give serious consider-
ation to another point of view.
In SUNlite 4-1, I mentioned an article
by James McGaha and Joe Nickell,
which indicated they had the solution
to the Exeter UFO case. The article is
now on line for reading. Martin Shough
provided a rebuttal of this explanation on
UFO Updates. Shough makes a reason-
able argument why the McGaha/Nickell
explanation is inadequate.
I think Nick Pope gets nuttier every
time he appears some place. Now he
claims that the smoking gun photograph
of UFOlogy was hanging on his office wall
for some time. He could easily have got-
ten a copy of it and placed it somewhere
2
safe but, instead, he allowed
it to be taken down and then
allow it to “disappear”. I
have heard this kind of story
before. I remember telling
my teacher that my dog ate
my homework too. I pulled
the thread on this one and
decided to contact Dr. David
Clarke to see what Mr. Pope
was talking about. Dr. Clarke
says there is a photocopy of
the image in the British files
(DFE-31-180 pages 37) and
describes the whole affair
at his blog. Apparently, the
photographer is unknown
and he first submitted the photographs
to the newspaper, “The Scottish Daily
Record”. They chose not to publish the
images, which makes one wonder if they
were as convincing as Pope suggests.
IMO, based on the anonymous nature of
the photographer and what the files indi-
cate, it probably was nothing more than
a hoax.
Once again, one of UFOlogy’s “top ten
UFO cases” has been put under the
microscope. Lance Moody took on the
Santa Barbara channel case and discov-
ered that Blue Book’s conclusion had
some merit. Lance makes a pretty good
argument that this was probably just an
unusual cloud (possibly lenticular).
Another one of UFOlogy’s “Top Ten”
cases took a hit when Ian Ridpath and
James Oberg began to ask questions
about the Yukon UFO case of Decem-
ber 11, 1996. This case had the endorse-
ment of Stanton Friedman and Michael
Swords. Unfortunately, they seemed to
have simply accepted the story as told
by the principle investigators. The real
investigation seems to have been done
by Canadian satellite expert Ted Molc-
zan. He discovered that at the time of the
event (at least for the principle witnesses),
a Russian rocket booster from Cosmos
2335 launched on 11 December, 1996
 Who’s blogging UFOs? (Cont’d)
was reentering the earth’s atmosphere to
the north of the witness’ location. One of
the witness sketches of the “big dipper”
was very consistent with what Molczan
had computed. This would not be the first
time that a meteor or space debris has cre-
ated these kinds of UFO reports. On page
36, I describe a meteor event that created
a similar type of report.
George Michael wrote a book review
for e-skeptic at the end of March that
caused skeptics to question e-skeptic’s
skepticism. Michael gave a positive review
of Leslie Kean’s book. However, as pointed
out by the rebuttal by Robert Sheaffer,
Michael seemed to be unaware of all the
explanations offered for her “unexplained
cases” and the questionable reliability of
some of her witnesses. This resulted in one
more final exchange between the two on
E-skeptic. I think Mr. Michael really did not
research the background on this book as
Sheaffer points out. I would like to point
out that the Rendlesham witnesses have
demonstrated that they are not reliable by
changing their stories from what was ac-
tually recorded in 1980. They have denied
reports they wrote and continue to find
ways to get UFOlogists to ignore the evi-
dence. Meanwhile, Ex-governor’ Fife Sym-
ington’s story is not consistent with what
actually transpired that night as pointed
out in SUNlite 3-5 (page 20). In another
Kean top case, the Petit-Rechain image
was revealed to be a hoax. The UFOlogists
and Kean ignored the skeptics arguments
in preference for the idea that it was an
authentic photograph of an alien space-
ship. Mr. Michael’s lack of skepticism to-
wards the claims being made and Leslie
Kean’s equally flawed approach in writing
the book is the major issue in all of this.
Kevin Randle reports that the Interna-
tional UFO Reporter is no longer going
to exist in print form. That really is not a
shock. The last I heard, the Center for UFO
Studies was being run out of their sci-
entific director’s, Mark Rodeghier, apart-
ment. There just isn’t the interest in their
organization since just about everybody
can read the stories on the internet any-
way. It is a money thing and I am sure they
will figure out how to run it as an on-line
magazine they can charge people to ac-
cess. It will save money on printing and
paper and make their organization more
profitable (assuming they still charge the
same amount). I wonder if they will put
together a new version of their DVD that
has a copy of all the issues. I don’t have a
copy of their current DVD yet (which goes
to 2008) but I might want to wait to get
the entire collection of IUR.
Along with the bug video that the
Chilean Air Force that made news (see
page), another video from Las Vegas,
Nevada was also circulated that had a
similar solution. Joe Capp made some
production about it and used it as an ex-
ample of how people don’t look up and
see UFOs. However, he ignores the pos-
sibility that people did look up and de-
termined what they saw was something
ordinary. Benjamin Radford states these
were just birds or bats feeding on insects
that were attracted by the bright spot-
light on the Luxor Hotel. While Capp uses
it as an example of why people always
don’t report UFOs, Radford makes the
counterpoint that the reason they don’t
report them is because they know what
they are.
Kentaro Mori posted a wonderful blog
entry concerning Erick Von Daniken. I
was amazed to see the video from NOVA’s
program about ancient astronauts from
1977. I remember reading/seeing all the
books/TV programs/films from the 1970s
concerning “The chariots of the gods”. I
was fascinated with the subject for about
five to ten years. After reading more about
it in the late 1970s/early 1980s I began to
question the interpretations presented. I
missed the NOVA program because of my
early period in the navy really did not give
me regular access to television. I wish I
saw this program when it aired because
it is very damaging and I would have
changed my opinion much sooner. Mori’s
blog entry and the video should be re-
quired reading/viewing for all those who
blindly accept the statements in the more
recent Ancient aliens program on the His-
tory Channel.
Kentaro Mori also presented a posting
about the infamous alien with the FBI/
KGB men photograph. This has long
been considered a hoax. Kentario found
the source of the photograph and revealed
3
it came from a magazine that conducted
an April Fool’s joke. Mori points out that
there are many obvious signs for the ar-
ticle being a prank. The photograph is a
montage of several images with the alien
being an image of a skater.
Robert Sheaffer exposed the claim of
Phil Klass offering Steve Pierce a bribe
as something of a folktale. Mr. Sheaf-
fer obtained Klass’ Travis Walton file from
the American Philosophical Society and
found the transcript of a phone conver-
sation between Klass and Pierce on June
11, 1978. Mr. Pierce seems to tell a dif-
ferent story in 1978 than he does today.
At that time, he refers to Walton as “igno-
rant“ and “stupid”. Of course, I am sure
those supporting Pierce and Walton will
now state that Klass purposefully altered
the transcript in order to hide his effort to
bribe Pierce.
There was an interesting debate be-
tween Gary Heseltine and Chris French
concerning Rendlesham. Heseltine
tried to spin the story the same way pro-
ponents have spun it for decades. French
pretty much made Ridpath’s argument,
which is so sound that Rendlesham pro-
ponent Jenny Randles has accepted it
as a good explanation of the event. He-
seltine appeared to avoid talking about
the actual witness statements written in
1980 and how the lighthouse rotation
rate synchs up nicely with the airmen
noting the light flashing at them on the
tape. He also used the false claim that
skeptics were talking about flying light-
houses, which no skeptic ever stated.
Robert Hastings does not like any-
body treading on his turf. Stephen
Bassett apparently has issued a petition
and press release regarding UFOs and
Nukes. Hastings spends a great deal of
effort pointing out Bassett’s errors. He
also points out his belief that the aliens
in the spaceships that are tampering
with our nuclear weapons are telling us
to get rid of them. Is Hastings suggest-
ing that the aliens would step in and stop
an nuclear exchange if that was about
to occur? Why didn’t they just stop the
dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan
or above ground testing if they were that
interested in stopping nuclear weapons?
Is it possible that Robert Hastings is sim-
ply allowing his personal beliefs to affect
his interpretation of these reports?
The Roswell
Corner
The missing Brazel interview
A ccording to the latest news, Mack
Brazel’s audio interview with Walt
Whitmore in 1947 has existed for many
years with Dave Aaron. Unfortunately,
Mr. Aaron allowed this recording, as well
as hundreds of others, to sit in his girl-
friend’s garage. When she passed away,
the city came in and had to clean it up be-
cause it was a health hazard. Apparently,
there were lots of cats in the house. The
recording apparently was destroyed.
This all sounded a bit strange to me. Am
I supposed to believe that this recording,
which was thought lost to the world all
these years, was sitting in a pile of tapes
in this garage for all this time? Why didn’t
this UFOlogist get the tape and produce
it for Roswell enthusiasts/investigators?
He could have made a nice bit of coin
selling it or he could have received some
publicity. I can think of three scenarios
regarding this tape:
1. The recording does not exist.
2. The recording exists but reflects the
same story told by Brazel to the Ro-
swell Daily Record.
3. The recording exists and it is the
Roswell smoking gun where Brazel
describes the bodies, the spaceship,
and the cover-up.
I think one or two is most likely. #3 is
highly unlikely because if the recording
did contain this, it would not have resid-
ed in a garage all of these years.
About a week after this news became
public, Kevin Randle revealed that Don
Schmitt interviewed Mr. Aaron to resolve
the issue. Schmitt discovered that Aaron
had it in his possession since 2003 and
hold sold copies of the recording to nine
people. He also told Schmitt that he did
not recall much of the recording but did
remember how it opened. Schmitt rec-
ognized the words since they were from
scene concerning the interview from
the Showtime “Roswell” movie. In other
words, it was not the real thing. So op-
tion one is applicable. The recording, as
advertised (the actual interview and not
a recreation), did not really exist.
The coming of the triangles
O ne of the most commonly promoted
UFOs these days happens to be the
massive triangular UFO. One wonders
when they became the rage. Since 1947,
the disc shape was most commonly re-
ported by witnesses. Even today, most
UFO reports are described as an ellipse,
egg, or orb. These are dull and not often
hyped by UFO promoters/groups. How-
ever, if somebody sees a massive V or
triangle UFO, it gets quite the emphasis
on blogs and in discussion groups. Why
is this so?
As best I can tell, the “massive triangular
UFOs” did not appear until the Hudson
valley UFO events in the early 1980s. Af-
ter that “wave” dissipated, they did not re-
appear in significant numbers of reports
until the Belgium events of 1989-1992.
Thanks to a few well publicized events,
the triangular shaped objects became
the signature shape for the Belgian UFO
wave. The events of March 30-31, 1990
discussed in this issue were started by
witnesses seeing points of light in the
shape of a triangle and they assumed
they saw the lights attached to one craft.
Since that time, several UFO events were
described as huge flying triangles. The
1997 Arizona 8PM event being the most
popular.
Writing in the Condon report, Dr. William
Hartmann coined the term “airship effect”,
which has the witnesses playing connect
the dots with multiple light sources in or-
der to construct a craft based on popular
designs in the UFO literature. This effect
has revealed itself in the past. Allan Hen-
dry noted it when he was identifying UFO
reports that involved ad planes.
...sketches that were done by the adver-
4
tising plane witnesses exhibited a “filling
in” of structural information that was not
actually present in the dark to their vision.
The advertising plane IFOs serve here as a
UFOlogical Rorschach blot. They show us
that people in general want to “read in” a
certain model flying saucer to what was
only a row of sequentially flashing lights.”
Once the idea that UFOs could be huge
triangular shaped objects was estab-
lished, it would not take much to create
massive triangular objects out of the
three light sources. After all, as long as
they are not nearly in a straight line, three
light sources will form the shape of a tri-
angle.
If the concept that huge triangular UFOs
exist in the UFO literature, why did they
appear? I have some theories. Aircraft
in formation at night are not something
that occurs often. Additionally, some
aircraft have unusual lighting that is mis-
leading. When these aircraft pass over
densely populated areas, they can pro-
duce reports that indicate a large triangle
flying over. However, why weren’t these
types of large UFOs reported before the
1980s?
Is it any surprise that the coming of the
huge triangles coincided with the same
time period that produced the three very
popular Star Wars movies where massive
wedge-shaped star destroyers were used
by the empire? It is something to con-
sider.
Notes and references
1. Hendry, Allan. The UFO Investigators
Handbook. London: Sphere Books
Ltd. 1980. p. 91
 March 30-31, 1990 - The Belgium F-16 UFO Chase
T he Belgian UFO wave is often consid-
ered one of those landmark events in
UFOlogy. SUNlite has published quite
a few articles demonstrating that there
are reasons to question the events as
described. Even more damning was the
recent revelation that the only good pho-
tograph taken of a Belgian Triangle was
a hoax.
However, there is one part of the wave
that has reached almost mythic propor-
tions thanks to television shows like Un-
solved Mysteries and books like Leslie
Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Gov-
ernment Officials Go On the Record. This
event is the March 30-31 attempted inter-
ception of UFOs by two Belgian Air Force
F-16s. For some reason certain examina-
tions of this event are ignored or omitted
from these presentations. This is proba-
bly because these studies do not appear
in English and are not widely known.
I intend to attempt to present the events
of March 30-31 in a manner for every-
one to understand what happened and,
hopefully, demonstrate that the case is
not as exotic as claimed by some of these
presentations.
Visual sightings
P rior to March 30th, the Belgian Air
Force (BAF) had come to an agree-
ment that they would send fighters up
to intercept UFOs if there were sightings
that could be confirmed. They had al-
ready done so twice before March 30th
but were unsuccessful in intercepting
any UFOs.
On the night of March 30th, starting
around 2300 local time, reports came
in from a gendarme (Marechal des logis
Alain Renkin) in the town of Ramilles. At
first it was a single luminous point in the
western sky that changed color. Later,
two other points were identified and they
formed a triangle in the sky. According to
Joel Mesnard:
The most luminous of the three points of
light continued to withdraw slowly to-
wards Gembloux. The upper point was
visible towards Thorembais-Saint Trond
(due west), while the third point was to-
wards Chaumont-Gistoux (between NW
and WNW).1
Other patrols nearby now began to no-
tice the lights in the same general loca-
tions of the sky. Mr Renkin also began to
report another set of lights in the form of
a triangle below the main triangle he first
observed.
All of these reports precipitated the ar-
rival of Captain Jaques Pinson, who was
second-in-command of the Wavre Gen-
darmerie brigade. He confirmed the
sightings. According to the reports, Pin-
son reported the lights to be like large
stars only they were constantly changing
colors.
Meanwhile, the radar at Glons began to
pick up radar contacts in the area that
were drifting slowly westward. These
contacts were picked up by the Semmer-
zake radar. Because of the radar confir-
mation of the visual sightings, it was de-
cided that the F-16s at Beauvechain be
sent up to investigate the intruder.
The sighting lines for Mr. Renkin. To his NNW was Beavuechain Airbase where the F-16s came from. To the north of that was where the initial ra-
dar contact was reported. However, the F-16s were sent to the WSW of Brussels (large white area to the left) on their initial interception attempt.
5
The F-16 radar
The F-16 was fitted with an AN/APG-66
pulse-doppler radar which is used to track
airborne targets. The radar operates in
several modes depending upon what the
pilot requires. They would use the scan
mode to locate targets and a target track-
ing mode to “lock-on” to the target. The
scanning mode provides various beam
widths in front of the aircraft. Based on
the images of the display that have been
presented, the beam width appeared to
be set at its widest mode of 60 degrees.
The initial version of the radar used by
the Belgian Air Force was eventually up-
graded to a later version in 1992 because
of several problems. One was a high num-
ber of false alarm returns that could not
be corrected. While this problem did
not play a significant role in the events
that night, it has been suggested that
one or more of the contacts registered
may have been this type of return.
The F-16 interception
S hortly after midnight, the F-16s took
off in an effort to intercept the UFOs.
However, instead of heading towards Ra-
milles or north of their air base where the
initial radar contact was detected, the F-
16s were sent to the southwest of Brus-
sels near the town of Soignies.
What transpired over the next forty min-
utes is hard to determine because the
studies and radar data are not widely
available. Professor Auguste Meessen
has the data and presented some of it
on his web site. Although it is in French,
one can get the general idea of his ar-
ticle using translation software. It is too
bad that the study performed by Salmon
and Gilmard of the Belgian Royal Military
Academy is not available. I attempted to
obtain a copy from several people but it
is apparently unavailable because it was
a confidential report. However, in Mees-
sen’s discussion, we do have an image
that comes from that report.
Some may find the map confusing but a
bit of careful examination and compari-
son to the transcript that was also avail-
able can help make things a bit easier to
understand. I hope to go through each
leg of the F-16 flight.
I would like to point out that these aircraft
and radar contact positions are all ap-
proximate based on the Salmon-Gilmard
map and Meessen’s plot. The ground ra-
dar contacts are based on the pilot-CRC
transcript, which seems to have been part
of the Lambrecht’s report. The purpose is
only to show the general locations, what
the pilots were chasing, and what the
ground radars were describing.
Time 0008-0010
Time 0010-0013
Time 0008 - 0010
A s the F-16s flew into the area east of
Soignies they were being directed
towards a contact (white shaded circle in
the image at lower left) that was in the vi-
cinity of Enghien and Halle. The control-
ler gave them directions to the contact,
which was supposedly at 10,000 feet. The
F-16s could not see or detect any craft.
Time 0010-0013
T he F-16s, being directed by CRC, can
not make any contact visually or with
their radar despite flying over/near the
contacts (white shaded areas). As the F-
16s travel south, they obtained a visual
contact but it was a bright flashing light
on the ground (star symbol at bottom of
image). About the same time, a contact
is registering in the area of Tubize and
Halle. The F-16s turn north again to find
that target.
Time 0013-0015
Time 0013-0015
A t time 0013, the F-16s resumed their
flight north to find the contacts reg-
istering on the ground radar. As the F-16
approached the area, it finally found a
radar contact at 9000 feet flying at 310
6
Time 0015-0017
knots (red markers). The contact would
disappear quickly. Meanwhile, the inter-
cept controller tried to get the F-16 to
make a sharp turn because the F-16 flew
past their contact (white shaded areas).
While this contact was behind them, the
F-16 radar caught a contact further away
to the north (red marker).
Time 0015-0017
T he F-16s turn around again to go after
the contact reported by the controller
near Nivelles that they had overshot. The
transcript is not very clear but control
seems to have lost this contact and the F-
16s travel south. They must have record-
ed a contact of some kind (red marker)
because it is marked in the Salmon-Gil-
mard map but not recorded in the tran-
script. Control turned the F-16s around
again to go back to another contact that
was being seen in the same general area
as the previous contacts.
Time 0017-0018.
Time 0017-0018
A fter being turned around, the F-16s
fly by the latest contact without any
indication they had seen it visually or on
their radar. This results in another 180
degree turn. Sometime during this ma-
neuver, the jets see a civilian aircraft and
wonder aloud if this might be what they
were chasing. It appears that the F-16s
are flying in circles looking for some very
elusive contacts.
Time 0018-0020.
Time 0018-0020
T he F-16s now get a new contact (white
shaded area) as they turn towards the
southeast. Again, they fly by it without
seeing anything or obtaining a radar con-
tact. After flying past it, they are, again,
asked to turn around towards the west.
Time 0020-0024
T he jets fly west but have no contacts
and the controller has nothing either.
They turn around again and head east.
As they head east, the F-16s get two con-
tacts (red markers). One is described as
“possible” by the pilot. Even though they
obtain some contacts briefly, they fail to
observe anything visually.
Time 0024-0027
T he transcript never mentions any
contacts by the F-16s but the Salmon-
Time 0020-0024
Time 0024-0027
Gilmard map plots two during this peri-
od. They must have been brief contacts.
The controlling station reported they did
have a contact to the west (white shad-
ed area), which prompted another turn
around towards that direction. The pilot
would report that this contact was “civil-
ian traffic”. As the planes head towards
the southwest, they report seeing a flash-
ing light.
Time 0027-0030
Time 0027-0030
T his time period has the jets flying to-
wards the southwest to investigate
the light. They would pass over the light
7
(white star symbol) for a position fix. The
report states that this turned out to be a
smokestack with a flashing light. This is
also the same flashing light seen at time
0013. After identifying the light, they
turned towards the east again. Salmon
and Gilmard register two contacts (red
markers) but the pilots make no mention
of them in the transcript. Around time
0030, intercept control informs the pilots
they have a contact to the north-north-
east (white shaded area).
Time 0030-0035
T he map on page 8 is based on Auguste
Meessen’s track from his web site. The
F-16s proceed eastward looking for the
elusive UFOs. Glons gives one contact
(shaded area) that seems to match sev-
eral of the contacts reported by the F-
16s (red markers). However, the contact
eludes the F-16s and simply disappears.
Time 0035+
A t this point The F-16s flight path is
not clearly known. They maneuver
about looking for contacts and, like the
previous half-hour of flight operations,
can never locate anything solid even
though they do obtain some lock-ons.
The gendarmes were confused
D uring this time period, the F-16s are
now flying in the area that visual ob-
servations were made. The Lambrecht’s
report states that the gendarmerie saw
the F-16s fly right by their UFOs without
noticing them. This implies that what
they were reporting as UFOs were not
visible to the pilots.
 Time 0030-0035

Aftermath study being completed, it is not widely suggested that some of the sources of
published and rarely mentioned. these “moist air cells” had to do with the

I n the summer of 1990, the Lambrechts

report, written by the Air staff of the
Belgian air force, was released describing
Auguste Meessen
industrial centers. He specifically men-
tioned how smoke stacks could create
their own micro-climates, which might
what transpired that night and some con-
clusions. The report gave the impression
that something was in the sky with the F-
A uguste Meessen, a proponent for
UFO events being some form of ex-
otic craft, added to the solution by writ-
produce these convection bubbles.

Des masses d’air chaud, passant séparé-

16s that night. It did note that the pilots
failed to see anything visually. However,
it also highlighted how reliable they con-
sidered the reports from gendarmes.
Over the years, the number of intercep-
tions and “lock-ons” performed by the
F-16s have become exaggerated. Many
contacts were registered as noted in this
article. However, it seems that while there
were dozens of contacts observed by the
F-16 radar, the actual number of lock-
ons, according to the Lambrechts report,
was just three.
Salmon-Gilmard
ing a paper describing how “moist air
cells/convection bubbles” were the cause
of many of the radar echoes that night.
Meessen traced the passage of these
“moist air cells” using the radar data and
demonstrated how they drifted in the
same general direction of the winds that
evening. This is something noted in the
Lambrecht’s report.
The elusive nature of the contacts the F-
16s were ordered to pursue and the lack
of any visual contacts indicates these
were all probably caused by the atmo-
spheric conditions that night. Meessen
ment les unes des autres entre les gen-
darmes et le ciel étoilé, devaient agir com-
me des lentilles.3
I translate this to read:
These moist air masses could come from
factory chimneys or power plants.
It is interesting to note that the F-16s
kept flying around the same general area
for about fifteen minutes chasing con-
tacts that the ground radar stated were
present. All they had to show for it was
a smoke stack with a bright flashing light

I n 1992, Major Salmon and civil engineer

Gilmard of the Belgian Royal Military
Academy, released a study that analyzed
the radar data. They concluded that on
three occasions, the contact registered
by one F-16 was the other F-16. They
also felt that many of the contacts were
nothing more than radar angels/false
targets and ground clutter. At one point
a contact was registered going into the
ground indicating that it was some form
of reflection. The F-16 radar data began
Auguste Meessen’s plot of radar contacts seen by ground radar for the night of March 30-31, 19902
to lose its luster. Despite this informative

8
This was not the only large smoke stack in the area. A quick view
of Google earth revealed several smoke stacks and cooling towers
in the area between Tubize and Brussels, which were just east (up-
wind) of the area where the F-16s spent the first fifteen minutes of
their search.

Professor Meessen also suggested that the police officers mistook

stars as UFOs because of these unusual atmospheric conditions. He
pointed towards the star Sirius as the prime suspect in his paper.

Along with a lengthy discussion of these moist air cells, Professor

Meessen mentions one contact that he labeled as “unidentified”
because it lacked a transponder signal. This contact flew a straight
path between Brussels and Liege at an average speed of about
450-500 knots (<600 mph). The F-16s were never vectored towards
it indicating that the radar operators probably knew what it was.
There is reason to suspect that this was probably just an aircraft, A handheld telephoto photograph of the star Sirius. This is part of a 5 second exposure where I pur-
which had a malfunctioning transponder or had turned it off for posefully moved the camera. The fluctuations and color changes are evident in the streak. These are the
effects of scintillation, which commonly is misinterpreted by inexperienced observers as a UFO flashing
some reason. lights at them.

Closing the book

T he Belgian AF F-16 chase has become staple in the UFO litera-

ture as some form of extraordinary event when it really was not.
For some reason, the work of Meessen and Salmon-Gilmard is little
known, overlooked, ignored, or left out of the literature.

What this case really demonstrates is an application of Phil Klass’

UFOlogical principle #9:

Whenever a light is sighted in the night skies that is believed to be a

UFO and this is reported to a radar operator, who is asked to search The night sky on March 30, 1990 at 2330 local time. There were numerous bright stars and planets vis-
his scope for an unknown target, almost invariably an “unknown” ible in the western sky, where the gendarmes saw their UFOs.

target will be found. Conversely, if an unusual target is spotted on a

radarscope at night that is suspected of being a UFO, an observer is
dispatched or asked to search for a light in the night sky, almost in-
variably a visual sighting will be made.4

In this instance, the gendarmes mistook scintillating stars for UFOs

and the radar operators, expecting to see a return corresponding
to the visual sightings, found targets they normally would have ig-
nored. Like these radar contacts, this UFO case is nothing more
than a phantom, which disappears upon close examination.

Notes and references

1. Mesnard, Joel. “Belgium haunted by huge triangular craft

II.” Flying Saucer Review. Volume 35 Number 4 (Decem-
ber 1990). Available WWW: http://www.ignaciodarnaude.
com/avistamientos_ovnis/Mesnard-Creighton,UFOs%20
1989,Belgium,FSR1990V35N2.pdf page 4.

2. Meessen, Auguste. DES ECHOS RADAR D’ORIGINE ME-

TEOROLOGIQUE. Available WWW: http://home.nordnet.
fr/~phuleux/deschos.htm

3. ibid. The sighting lines described by Mr. Renkin in Ramilles are marked in blue. The large red bands show the
locations of stars and planets during the time period of observation. Additional star azimuths (red arrows)
are shown as more potential visual sources. The location of Beavuehcain air base and the first contact
4. Klass, Philip. UFOs Explained. New York: Random House, 1974. reported in the Lambrechts report.
p. 184

9
Roger wrote this piece when I mentioned I
was looking at the case. It may sound simi-
lar to the article I wrote, but it covers some
areas that I did not bother to look into. -
Tim
T his evening is described in SOBEPS
VOB1 pages 173-186 and 363-395.
At about 23 H (11 pm) the gendarmes
from Wavre , being at Ramillies see in the
sky bright lights forming a big triangle
and small triangles, eight lights. They
take contact with the Belgian military ra-
dar center CRC from Glons. The CRC de-
tected only one radar echo at 10000 feet.
The decision to send the F16 was not de-
cided at this moment.
Observations by the gendarmes
L ater this night the gendarmes contin-
ue to see the lights changing various
ways, white, yellow, green, or blue and
red. These colours variations , a few sec-
onds, where accompanied from varia-
tions of the brilliance.
The description made by the gendarmes
from apparent move on fixed places,
“jerky moves around a mean ( medium) po-
sition” and the change in colours , much
perceptible for the lights situated at 15°
height then for those situated more than
40° above the horizon . This jerky move
around a medium position on a black sky
is due to the eyes movements of the ob-
server. Indeed, the eye is constantly mov-
ing so the image of a fixed point form
on different point of the retina. This give
the impression of a move around a fixed
point.
These light variations clearly identify stars
in particular meteorological circumstanc-
es, clear sky with atmospheric turbulenc-
es and humidity of the air with fine veils
of clouds invisible to naked eyes.
An astronomical software shows that ,
during the gendarmes observations, at
SW could be seen bright stars with mag-
nitude below 2., and descending to (- 2,2)
for Jupiter the brighter light in the sky
this evening. Sirius was low on the hori-
zon, Procyon, Rigel, Betelgeuse , Castor
and Pollux, Capella.
You must note that three non-aligned
points form always a triangle and, with
The evening of 30
March 1990 : Observa-
tions by the F16s
By Roger Paquay
the stars on view it was a possibility to
see different triangles.
Later in the evening the gendarmes say
that when the F16 were passing in the
vicinity of the light , the light seemed
to change place and then come again
at his initial place when the planes were
far away from the light. This can be ex-
plained easily: An optical illusion ap-
pears when a plane seen by his lights
passes close to a star. The stars seem to
move so long the plane is between them
or close to them. Then, when the plane
goes away the stars seem to come again
at their initial place. This sort of move is
described by the gendarmes when the
F16 where passing closer to the lights.
It is the correct description of one very
few known optical illusion. This illusion
is explained when the witness look the
plane as reference point. The apparent
distance from star to the plane seem to
decrease and to approach the reference
point, then when the plane goes away
the star seem to came at his initial point
( point that never changed) because the
star anew become the reference point.
Observations of the F16s
A t 0h15, following the radar observa-
tion from Glons , an abnormal spot
always at 10000 feet in the area of Wavre,
two F16 take off from Beauvechain. They
10
could not observe something but they
registered radar contact with abnormal
data, supersonic speeds and big appar-
ent accelerations. The radars of Glons
and Semmerzaeke were only detecting
the same spot at 10000 feet high when
the gendarmes continued to describe
bright objects placed in triangle. At the
same time the F16 did detect nothing at
the place indicated by the gendarmes.
At the end of May 1990 the Belgian air
force send to the Sobeps that edit it the
“Lambrechts report”.
What can we learn from this report: “this
evening the radar from Glons detected
one contact. Two F16 were send in the
area, they registered abnormal radar con-
tact but did not see something. The gen-
darmes on ground could not take pic-
tures. One registered contact by the F16
seems to show an acceleration of 22G. We
will explain this later. No supersonic bang
was heard by the gendarmes. Fantastic
accelerations seemed to be detected; the
speed of the “ufo” change from 280km/h
to 1800 km/h in a few seconds and ex-
tremely quick vertical moves.
Following the wing meteo there was this
evening temperature inversion close to
the ground and at 3000 feet too. There
was also violent wind, 50 to 60 knots, at
10000 feet. These atmospheric situation
could probably explain these abnormal
data.
Another radar property can also explain
the abnormal data. We will detail this
later.
A second spot radar is detected at 0h32
by Glons and Semmerzaeke , military ra-
dars, an engine that fly from the neigh-
bourhood of Beauvechain in direction
of Liege at about 900 km/h., but is not
detected by the civilian radars from Ber-
tem and Maastricht. Bertem is the Brus-
sels airport radar and is very close from
Wavre, so it is intriguing he did not detect
something in his area. The spot disappear
at 2000 m high at a position close from
Bierset military airport near Liège
What is intriguing is that the f16 did not
detect this engine and are not send to
identify it. They were close to this engine.
As Glons is part of the NADGE (Nato Air
Defense Ground Environnement), his
mission is to detect all engines flying
above Belgium and to identify them. If
it is an enemy he must send the F16 to
intercept it or to destroy it. This was not
done. Why?
What must we retain from these observa-
tions: Apparently the F16 radars detected
vertical moves with very high speed and
enormous accelerations. Are these data
linked to real moves or to atmospheric
phenomenon or artefact from the radar?
We will explain this in a paragraph on
“Some data on the radar from the F 16”.
Colonel De Brouwer (now retired as Gen-
eral), in the postface of the Sobepes book
“ Vague d’ovnis sur la Belgique”, tome 1
do not exclude the possibility that un-
known planes were in our sky. He also
think of magnetic perturbations, we were
effectively in a period of very intensive
activity from the Sun , at the peak of the
solar cycle. The solar activity was very in-
tense the whole week before 30 March
1990 with a very high number of solar
spots and ejection from intense charged
particles.
We must remark that, whatever the radar
technology, there always subsist a per-
centage of false detections and not ex-
plainable detections. The origin may be
very various, noise from the apparatus,
birds, clouds, water vapour in air, atmo-
spheric inversion, separation between
cold and warm front. Echoes from fixed
obstacle can also give abnormal detec-
tion. Tropospheric and ionospheric re-
flections can also induce radar spots. And
finally: for different types of radar, the
elimination from echoes corresponding
to fixed obstacles cannot be done to-
tally.
Finally an internal report made by Colonel
Salmon (major at this moment) and civil
engineer Gilmard working for the “Center
electronic of War” concluded that errors
were made in interpreting the data: On
the ten detections, three correspond to
the second F16? The others are due to at-
mospheric inversions. The lights seen by
the gendarmes were “stars”.
Mister Meessen, the only who could see
the Salmon –Gilmard report, recognized
the meteorological phenomenon and
their influence on the radars.
The pilots , when questioned on these
radar detection say that frequently, when
they fly at 30000 feet in a clear sky, they
observe regularly spots corresponding to
apparently vertical moves with very high
speed and that correspond to “Nothing”.
About the Lambrechts report
T his report correspond to the night
from 30 to 31 mars. He give the dec-
larations from the gendarmes, the chro-
nology from the radars contacts and the
conversations between the pilots and the
control tower on ground in Beauvechain.
Then we find the length of the contacts
and their transcription ;
See the table of contacts below.
We find a data indicating an acceleration
of 22 G (G = 9,81 m/s²). At this moment
the radar indicate a change in the speed
from 150 knots to 560 knots in one sec-
ond, the plane is turning while his alti-
tude stays at 6000 feet. See table of con-
tact data on page 12.
Knot or nautical mile correspond to 1852
m. is used in aviation as speed unit by
anglo-saxons. I do convert it in km/h to
use the motions laws in m/s.
150 knots = 150 x 1,852 = 277,8 km/h =>
77,166 m/s
560 knots = 560 x 1,852 = 1037,12 km/
h=>288,09 m/s
The motion law of uniformly accelerated
move (In french MRUA) is used by the
Lambrechts report to calculate the accel-
eration “a”.
This law: v = v0 + a*t gives: 288,09
=77,166 + a*1 . (V = vitesse can be re-
placed for USA by S = speed).
So “a” = 210,92 m/s² , thus 21, 5 G.
We cannot accept this value as real be-
cause the distance covered by the “en-
gine” is not calculated with the second
law of motion, the distance law:
e = v0 * t + ½ a * t²
What distance would have been covered
in one second with this acceleration. The
answer is :
11
e = 77,166* 1 + ½* 210,92 * 1² =182,626
m.
So in one second the engine if it is real
could only cover 182,626 m. Why this dis-
tance was not calculated is not explained
in the report.
You must know that the uniformly ac-
celerated move laws are solutions from
a system of two equations that are not
independent.
v = v0 + a*t
e = v0 * t + ½ a * t².
In these equation you have five variable
and distinct data. If you know three you
can calculate the two others:
v0 ( initial speed), v (final speed) , a (ac-
celeration), e (covered distance), t (length
of time = duration).
If you have more than three variable , four
in the case of the F16 you have different
manner to calculate he fifth variable. But
if the variables are not coherent you will
find different results. In this case you can-
not conclude. If the results give the same
value to the different variable, then data
are coherent and the result is correct.
In the case cited by the Lambrechts re-
port this verification by the second law
was not effective. We will demonstrate
it. It is a very serious error in the use of
the motions laws. So the fantastic accel-
eration indicated cannot be sure. Indeed
if the data are not compatible the result
will be erroneous.
If we consult the graph Fig 11 page 21
from the Meesen document “Analyse
approfondie des mysterieux enregis-
trement radar des F16” (see next page),
we see the speed passes from 150 knots
to 560 knots and it is effectively a rectilin-
ear vertical move, what justify the use of
the two motions laws.
On the same fig 11 you see the altitude
passes from 3000 to 7000 feet (follow
the red line I added on this figure) If
you know a foot, anglo saxon measure
is 30, 48 cm you can calculate the alti-
tude changes from 914 m to 2133,6 m .
the theoretical distance covered is thus
1219,6 m. But the distance that could be
 Data from the Lambrecht’s report
calculated with the motions law is only
182,626 m.
This clearly demonstrate that the calcu-
lated acceleration 22 G does not corre-
spond to a real object but is an artefact
from the radar.
Follow the red line on this fig 11
We must remark this conclusion could
have been found since the beginning if
the laws had been correctly used.
We can also remark this figure shows an-
other anomaly because at the end of the
detection the speed would have been
1852 km/h at the altitude “ZERO” (Nul)
fig 11 page 21 from Meessen text on www.meessen.net , « Analyse approfondie des mystérieux
enregistrements radar des F16 »
Vague Belge: Fantastic accelera-
tions don’t exist
T he fantastic acceleration of 22 G is a
false conclusion because one mistake
has been done in the use of the motions
laws.. What mistake is it?
The mistake is a bad use of the two for-
mulas of rectilinear uniformly acceler-
ated motion.
These laws, law of speed and law of dis-
tance are part of a two equations system
with two unknown data.
There are five variable and distinct
12
data. If you know three, you can calcu-
late the two others.
In the case here, we have four distinct
data and the acceleration seems to be
the only thing you must calculate. So
they did do only this calculation.
There lies the difficulty and they get
caught in a trap. The calculated value
must verify the second law of motion
and this was not done.
We shall do this verification with the sec-
ond law.
e = 77,166* 1 + ½* 210,92 * 1² =182,626
m. We are far from the fourth data, 1219,6
m.that can be found on the fig 11 from
Meessen.
Conclusion:
The calculated acceleration do not verify
the second law and therefore you must
conclude the four data are incompatible
and form a set of inconsistent data.
If the radar has a real contact it is evi-
dent the acceleration calculated with
the law of speed will be coherent with
the distance covered by the target.
This data is unknown and you cannot
verify the coherence of the data. But if
the data are incoherent it is impossible to
say there was a contact.
This show to us that the radar data are
inconsistent at this moment and you
cannot say an engine was detected. You
cannot conclude that there was a fantas-
tic acceleration of 22 G. Thus there was
no fantastic acceleration, no supersonic
speed, and consequently no supersonic
bang.
Then why did the radar give these inco-
herent data?
Since 1992 different explanation were
given.
First, the Gilmard-Salmon report (*) con-
cluded that three of the observations
were the second F16, that the abnormal
echoes were due to abnormal atmo-
spheric conditions. The bright lights seen
from ground were stars very bright this
evening. For the only radar echo detect-
ed from ground you must know that the
pilots did see nothing at this place.
Professor Meessen recognized in VOB2
(second book from Sobeps) that the ab-
normal echoes were due to meteorologi-
cal circumstances from very long dura-
tion.
A third explanation based on the proper-
ties from pulse radar Doppler can com-
plete and explain entirely the observa-
tions.
I found it in a theory book on radars “ Ra-
dars, bases modernes” written by Michel
Carpentier, engineer, general technical
manager at “Thomson CSF”. This book
was edited by “Masson editions” ,Paris, in
1981. You must know that Thomson CSF
is a specialist firm for radars and equipped
many Belgian and European airport. This
book was used by the radarists at Zaven-
them Brussels airport and I could read it.
Radar data
T he pulse Doppler radar uses eight
wave trains with 64 impulses at eight
frequencies that are different each others
from 100 hertz.
The observed phenomenon, echoes with
very high speed, is a characteristic from
the pulse Doppler radar and is related
to his detection mode by correlation on
quasi simultaneous impulses. They don’t
are related to a real object and have not
any signification.
I have read and studied this book that is
used as reference book in many airports.
In this book you find:
On the radar, a bright spot is a detected
echo and the move from the bright spot at
each contact characterizes the move from
the object if it is a real one. But the place
of the bright spot depends on the emitted
frequency. So, when the radar emit short
pulses on different frequencies to have a
more precise detection you can observe
this phenomena :
if the frequency change during the
time needed to determine the radial
speed you obtain spots with very high
speeds. These spots don’t correspond
to a real object; they indicate the speed
from the bright point move.
In the book, page 224, you find:
Lorsque le radar change de fréquence cen-
trale d’émission pendant le temps néces-
saire à la mesure de la vitesse radiale des
cibles, on mesure surtout la vitesse avec
laquelle le point brillant s’est déplacé pen-
dant le même temps, vitesse qui peut être
énorme .
Translation:
When the radar change his central fre-
quency during the time needed to mea-
sure the radial speed of the target, you
measure the speed with whom the bright
point moved during the same time, speed
13
that can be very high.
This property explain the high speeds
detected and the fantastic but not real
accelerations because they don’t cor-
respond to a real object. The F16 pilot’s
recognize they often observe these spot
during a few seconds but they don’t care
of them. They say these spots are gener-
ally vertical and at very high speed. This
seems a very good explanation for the
phenomena.
So we must conclude: from the calcula-
tions and from the radar properties that
the fantastic accelerations are inexistent.
They were announced because the veri-
fication of the data coherence was not
done. These false results were published
by the Medias without verification and
used by ufologist to say that extrater-
restrial engine were here with fantastic
properties.
Another report from the Belgian air force
does the same mistake. This report, the
Lambrechts report, may be found on in-
ternet.
Every time a fantastic acceleration is
announced, it is always the result by
use of the first law, law of speed, with-
out verification of the compatibility of
the data with the distance covered. But
these data are not independent as I ex-
plained.
The assertions of fantastic accelerations
in these cases of bad use of the laws of
motion are without foundation. With
them fall down completely the assertions
of extraterrestrial engines and the asser-
tions of technologies in great advance on
the terrestrial technologies. The extrater-
restrial hypothesis falls down.
References
1. (*)Etude Gilmard-Salmon : « Analyse
des observations, le radar F16 et ré-
sultats du modèle », rapport interne
d’une étude effectuée au centre de
guerre électronique sous la direction
du colonel Salmon, mai 1991.
2. L’étude Gilmard-Salmon : VOB2 p
401
3. Tim Printy dans un article intitulé «
Belgium 1990 : « A Case for Radar-
 Visual UFOS » Signale que le radar du
F16, AN/APG-66) a été upgradé en
1990 en la version AN/APG-66(V)2.
Une des raisons invoquées était : «
augmenter la performance opéra-
tionelle, incluant une capacité de re-
pérage accrue et un pourcentage de
fausses alarmes réduit. Site : http://
home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/
Belg.htm
4. VOB p225 à 229 ;
5. Le rapport Lambrechts sur : http://
www.ufoevidence.org/documents/
doc408.htm ou par Google, recher-
che avancée, Vague belge ; ovnis,
nombreuses adresses et accès.
6. www.meessen.net , « Analyse appro-
fondie des mystérieux enregistre-
ments radar des F16 »
Nevertheless, it may help those who like
calculations to understand why, when
you have four data and that only three are
needed to solve the problem, you must find
the fourth data if the data are coherent. If
the data are incoherent the four different
manners to choose three inter four data
to solve the problem conduct to solutions
that are different each other. You never find
in this case the fourth data.
I n the last issue of SUNlite, I described a
conjunction between Venus and Jupi-
ter in mid-March that was probably go-
ing to generate some UFO reports. Like
clockwork, these reports appeared in the
MUFON and NUFORC databases.
Peter Davenport made a reasonable ef-
fort in identifying some of these UFO
reports but he missed a few. He identi-
fied thirteen cases by my count but I also
counted another five that probably were
of the two planets.
The most interesting reports could be
found in the MUFON database. The first
report, from Indiana on March 10th, in-
volved an automobile pursuit of the
planets. The two friends in the vehicle
discovered that no matter what they did,
they could not catch up with these two
objects.
Further west in Colorado, a witness noted
the lights were in the western sky and
one was closer than the other because it
was brighter. The UFOs would eventually
disappear around 9:45 PM. This is about
the same time the two planets set for this
location.
On March 11th, an individual in Michigan
was driving to their third shift job. They
saw the UFOs as they drove to work be-
tween 10:16 and 10:38 PM. The set time
for the two planets at this location was
about 10:40 PM CDT.
Another sighting on March 11th came
from Arizona. This witness noticed that
the four helicopters appeared to be flying
around them in circles. They went inside
14
and when they came back out 10 minutes
later, the UFOs were gone.
One witness, from California, reported go-
ing out to smoke a cigarette and noticed
two bright lights on the night of March
11th. They made it clear that he felt the
lights were too bright to be star and won-
dered if these were the same UFOs as the
“Phoenix lights”.
A Florida witness noticed Venus and Ju-
piter over a three day period (March 11-
14). They also noted that the two objects
changed position over a period of an
hour and a half. Despite the obvious clues
that this was an astronomical event, they
concluded it was “unidentified”.
A Pennsylvania witness on March 13th
reported that they were horrified when
they examined their photographs of the
UFOs. They showed two squiggly lines in
the western sky (twilight is receding) that
were in the same position as Jupiter and
Venus. I assume the witness was “hor-
rified” because they showed the UFOs
moving. However, the motion was not
associated with the planets. It was asso-
ciated with the camera, which the EXIF
data indicates was a one-second expo-
sure time.
The queen of UFOs and the king of the
planets were the culprits in all of these
cases. It is interesting to note that quite
a few media outlets reported that Venus
and Jupiter would be visible during this
time period. I guess if it isn’t on Facebook
or twitter, people are not going to know
what is going on in the sky. This won’t be
the last time this sort of thing happens.
O nce upon a time, there was a king
known as Ahab. Do not be confused;
this guy was not into whaling, but rather
ruled over Israel in Samaria for 22 years.
Now, it came to pass that Ahab linked up
with a princess of a neighboring king-
dom whose peoples called themselves
Zidonians. Despite the Z, they were not
extraterrestrials; nor was the princess
who we know as Jezebel. Jezebel and
her people worshipped a god named
Baal and, as husbands often do, he chose
to please his wife by deferring to her in
matters of religion. He set up an altar
and grove to serve this Baal, and not in a
tennis-y sense.
Now Ahab really must have known this
was a bad idea. His bloodline had served
God Almighty who was known quite
unambiguously to be a jealous god and
had proven it in quite sociopathic ways
through many generations. His own fa-
ther Omri was said to have been struck
down by The Almighty One for his vani-
ties. Even so, men fear women more than
gods for eminently, imminently, and inti-
mately practical reasons and one might
have hoped any being must forgive any
man such behavior, even kings. Ahab
thought wrong.
Thus it came to pass that God sent his
prophet Elijah the Tishbite to express his
anger and to inform Ahab that hence-
forth and until further notice he should
expect there would be no more rain in
the land he ruled, nor even dew, and you
can tell Baal to go jiggle himself and his
little Jezebel too. Baal, a Phoenician god
with priority and power over sky and
weather issues, was intended to take per-
sonal affront at God Almighty muscling
into his territory. Not waiting for a reply,
Elijah left.
God directed Elijah to hide out along one
of the tributaries of the river Jordan. Ra-
vens brought Elijah bread and flesh to
live on till the tributary dried up. When
finally he needed water, he moved on
to Zarephath. Despite the Z, this also is
not an extraterrestrial world, but some
long forgotten city in Zidon. There Eli-
jah bumped into a widow who gathered
sticks for a living. She did a double-take.
Elijah was a hairy dude and she had put
hairy dudes on her list of turn-ons or
would have if Playboy had done center-
folds back then. Playing matchmaker
It is Elijah the Tish-
bite! Fired Up by that
ol’ Hairy Baal-buster
by Martin Kottmeyer
and giving the ravens a break, God made
sure she could feed Elijah by providing
a supply of food that never spoiled and
miraculously replenished itself. If she
needed any more proof Elijah was a good
man to have around, that doubt erased
when the widow’s son fell ill and Elijah’s
prayers to God caused a miraculous re-
covery. Lucky for all, this Zidonian MELF
also was less than politically correct and
regarded Tishbites as just taboo enough
to be a turn on in this Phoenician enclave
more beholden to Baals.
Time passes and the drought back in Is-
rael stretches out to 3 years. Animals are
dying, including all the king’s horses and
all the king’s mules. The king is desper-
ately sending people around to find grass
and water to save what is left. Deciding
finally Ahab must have some measure
of his anger, God commands Elijah to
return to Ahab. Upon confronting him,
Ahab asks him if he is to blame for all this.
Elijah, of course, points out he had only
himself to blame. You know how God is
15
about these things. Just to underscore
to Ahab who’s the boss when it comes to
sky-gods, Elijah proposes a bonus extra-
credit test. Assemble Jezebel’s team of
Baal players on Mount Carmel. Sacrifice
two bulls. Put wood around both and
prepare them as you normally would any
burnt offering. Have each side call their
god to set the offerings on fire. Which-
ever god wins, you follow religiously.
This sounds not only fair, but a lot more
science-y than that one-must-need-faith
airy fairyness you usually hear believers
bleat about. Everybody gathers up on
the mount. The Baal-pray-ers go first.
They dress the bull according to their se-
cret copyright-still-pending recipe then
start calling for Baal’s fire. They call and
call. This goes on for hours, but there is
no answer. They cut themselves, spilling
blood as was their custom. Doesn’t help;
still no answer. O Baal’s…
Like a Middle Eastern Craig Ferguson, the
Tishbite mocks them unmercifully. When
Elijah’s turn comes, he brings out 4 bar-
rels of water, and, allegedly to rub in the
fact there has been such a shortage, he
begins to pour the water over the bull
like he’s a millionaire gourmet. He uses
all the barrels till it flows in a surround-
ing trench. He calls on the Lord. Down
comes a fire. Whoomph. The bull, the
altar, the trench of water, explodes into
flame. I should resist wanting to sound
too modernly cynical or spill the beans
like some masked-magician wannabe,
but had I been present I might have been
heard to wonder – hmm, are you sure that
was water and not, say, a j’et-fool octane-
boostered cooking liqueur?
This being a religious proceeding, not a
testing lab; everybody fell on their faces,
praising God for Elijah having brought
such a high-end barbecue lighter to
their lowly luau. Elijah then ordered that
all the prophets following Baal be killed
then and there. The audience thinks that
is a swell way to settle the Baal-players’
gambling debt and so they were taken
to a river and, nope not baptized, slaugh-
tered. All 450 of them. Whoa, bet they
didn’t realize that was part of the deal.
But perhaps they should have since
Jezebel had been killing off Elijah’s co-
prophets and revenge was okey-dokey
in those pre-Buddhist days when the
circle of violence was allegedly little un-
derstood or at least not understood as a
problem anyone should feel bad about.
With the Baal-club sacked, God ordered
up a feast and had Ahab join in to show
there were no hard feelings. After due
courses, Elijah announces he hears the
sound of an abundance of rain. He goes
before his altar and casts himself to the
ground, face between his knees. He asks
a servant to go to the mountain’s edge
and check the sea for a sign. At first, there
is nothing. Could God still be angry?
Keep trying. On the 7th try, a small cloud
begins to rise up. That’s more like it.
Elijah gets in his chariot. Job’s done; got-
ta run. By the time he is down the moun-
tain, the sky is filling with black clouds.
Drought’s over, big-time. Elijah hightails
to Horeb, no dyslexic pun intended. It’s
not that he thinks Jezebel will feel hurt
cut off from her Baal’s support staff. He
just knows women. He may know how
to squeeze 450 of Baal’s finest, but Jezeb-
el? She’s got leverage. When she learns
what that Tishbite did to her retinue of
Baal-bleaters she quite predictably swore
bloody vengeance. Elijah runs 40 days
and 40 nights, as they tended to measure
trouble in those times, and he ends up
cowering in a cave. He cowers so darkly
he confesses to be having serious, even
suicidal, doubts about being a zealot in
God’s name.
God, only pretending to be dumb we
hope, asks, “What doest thou here, Elijah?”
Censor looking down, we’ll paraphrase
his answer: You can’t figure that out your-
self? Jezebel wants me dead. God orders
him out of the cave. God then does the
Raiders of the Lost Ark / Close Encounters
of the Third Kind thing for his spiritual up-
lift. God flies by: “a great and strong wind
rent the mountain.” Rocks break off and
fall in the process. God sends an earth-
quake. God sends fire. Only when God
speaks in a still small voice does Elijah
feel free to move again. He wraps up his
face, as desert folks do, and leaves. Desti-
nation: Damascus.
Elijah takes up with some tribes, like him-
self, who were not exactly Baal fans and
starts to build a fighting force of thou-
sands. Along the way he meets up with
a plowman named Elisha who over the
course of time grows up into being some
sort of wizard’s apprentice. The story
loses focus for a while with tribes battling
tribes. As usual they overdo this in that
part of the world, though you can’t help
being impressed when one day can see
as many as 100,000 footmen falling.
Eventually the story winds its way back
to Elijah finally standing before Ahab
again. Ahab asks, “Hast thou found me,
O mine enemy?” Elijah, redundantly by
this point, declares, “Behold I will bring
evil upon thee, and will take away your
posterity, and will cut off from Ahab him
that pisseth against the wall (blah, blah -
skip) for the provocation wherewith thou
hast provoked me to anger and made Is-
rael to sin.” And, oh, mustn’t forget this:
Dogs shall eat Jezebel’s body. By prosti-
tuting himself to Jezebel and her wicked
ways, by bowing down before foreign
idols, none before him had angered the
Lord God Almightily Jealous One nearly
so much as Ahab.
God always was a bit of a drama-queen in
these situations. He was repeating super-
latives slung at earlier kings and, anyways,
who can forget his snits involving the Del-
uge, Sodom & Gomorrah, Moses and the
Golden Calf incident, testing Abraham,
and on and on. Ahab in the teeth of the
dilemma realizes the smart thing to do
here is play submissive. He tears off his
clothes, dons sack cloth, fasts, and spoke
softly thereafter. It works, sort of.
And the word of the Lord came to Elijah
the Tishbite. Seest thou how Ahab hum-
bleth before me? Because he humbleth
before me, I will not bring evil in his days;
but in his son’s days will I bring the evil
upon his house.
Does that sound a bit – what? – une-
volved perhaps is the word I’m resisting --
What do I know? – not my kid, why care?
Nor, though, am I anthropologist enough
to feel relativism is an entirely appropri-
ate response. I’m sure Ahab’s son would
be scrunching up his face feeling might-
ily annoyed at how unfair that sounds to
him had he been on-stage. But he wasn’t.
Still, everybody but the author and Eli-
jah must suspect Ahab’s son eventually
heard about this injustice through the
grape-vine.
Thanks to Ahab’s humblething, peace
broke out in the Middle East. That lasted
three whole years. Ahab itches to go
16
to war, however, and Almighty One and
Only encourages this mistake by sending
a lying spirit among the prophets of the
court to behave as yes-men. Ahab dies in
battle. His son Ahaziah eventually takes
over as king, delayed by an interim suc-
cessor to the throne whose relevance to
the Elijah story can be guessed by the
fact we have deliberately forgotten his
name.
Highly out of nowhere, the new King
Ahaziah falls through a lattice on an up-
per story of the royal residence. The inju-
ry leads to a lingering illness and the king
makes the unfortunate choice of thinking
what his doggone momma would do in-
stead of poppa in this situation. He calls
for Baal-zebub. Zebub translates as Fly;
ergo Fly-Baal. I’m not kidding, though
the Biblical author might have been –
some think he was punning off Baal-ze-
bul which meant Baal the Prince. Either
way, the name points to this as the local
manifestation of Baal at the oracle in Ek-
ron some miles away. Ahaziah sent mes-
sengers to him to get a prognosis on his
condition.
On the advice of an angel of God – one
must always delegate such things - Elijah
suddenly pops up and stops the messen-
gers. He asks them if their pitched tra-
jectory means Ahab’s son does not think
God exists. God was keeping track on
him for just this sort of strike to fulfill his
promise to Ahab. Time’s up for Jezebel’s
ringer. The king should just go ahead and
die. The messengers return to the king
telling him of their encounter with an
anonymous hairy man girt in a girdle of
leather who foretells his death. The cam-
era zooms in on the king’s face as a flash
of recognition looms into his expression.
I’ll be damned - I mean been - “It is Elijah
the Tishbite!”
The king orders a troop of fifty to find Eli-
jah who has put out his shingle on a hill
in the distance. The troop captain orders,
“Come down.” Elijah warns him he is a
Man of God and will rain down fire if suf-
ficiently annoyed. The captain advances.
So stupid. Fire consumes the troop. A
second troop of 50 is sent and fire burns
them down as well. The captain of a third
troop had been paying attention back
when Ahab was in charge and knows the
right thing to do. He kneels before Eli-
jah and asks him pretty please to make a
housecall on the king. That’s more like it.
Elijah is escorted before the king and he
confirmed that, yes, God is angry he chose
Baal as his primary medical care provider.
His claim for care is still rejected. Just die,
son of Jezebel. And he does. You’re out,
Baal-boy. His reign was a mere two years
and he left no heirs to boot. Bad luck for
that bloodline, but Elijah gets credit for
good predicting as Bible prophets usu-
ally do in stories like this.
Having completed his mission on Earth,
or at least his plotline for the tale, people
begin to sense the story is about to wrap
up. Prophets at Beth-el ask Elisha, the
wizard’s apprentice, if he doesn’t think
the ending is coming and we should
head for the parking lot. Elisha quickly
shushes them. Maybe so, but sometimes
it’s worth staying around. Bible stories
aren’t always as downbeat and schmaltzy
as Moses. Then everybody sees Elijah
parting the waters of the river Jordan and
only Elisha decides to stick around for the
dénouement. They’re thinking we have
definitely seen this before. Elisha though
gets rewarded for staying: a nice big
Spielberg ending.
Behold there appeared a chariot of fire,
and horses of fire, and parted them both
asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirl-
wind into heaven. Elisha saw it and cried,
“My father, my father, the chariot of Israel
and the horsemen thereof.”
Nice touch and so appropriate, Elijah was
big with the fire spectacles. Afterwards,
Elisha rips his clothes into 2 pieces, thinks
sotto voce, “By the power of Moses – I
Have the Power!” then parts the River Jor-
dan exactly like his mentor. His prophet
brothers are nudging each other - Look
who’s leading man in the next install-
ment in the Moses franchise. Bet he gets
a big bald head, right?
###########
E xcusing the surfeit of self-indulgent
flourishes and liberties, I hope this
serves as a full and accessible adapta-
tion of the Old Testament story of Elijah.
I endeavored to capture primarily the
structure of the relationships, special ef-
fect sequences, and motivations be they
obvious or inscrutable. I’ve freely cherry-
picked material from several Bibles and
Bible commentaries that includes an em-
barrassingly/proudly dusty King James
paperback. The intent was to spare read-
ers the effort of slogging through less-
than-lucid Biblical prose to get the es-
sential shape, size, and character of the
story. I should not have to spell out for
skeptics why, even in the original, Elijah’s
story reads as a work of almost pure fic-
tion. The characters doubtless are loose-
ly based on real people, but it is more
myth than legend and even less is there
true history here. I don’t feel there is the
least point in taking it seriously as some-
thing that really happened, as ufologists
are wont to jargon, in ‘event-level reality.’
And never mind you should spend time
injecting ancient astronaut euhemerism
here. Erich von Daniken took as his mot-
to and method, “Myths are Eyewitness
Accounts.” Get a dictionary if you buy
that. Beyond the rather shabby behavior
of these theoretically ‘advanced’ beings, I
reject aliens who would really use ravens
to feed Elijah, part rivers, shake moun-
tains, and play matchmaker.
The story of Elijah has been frequently
mentioned in the ancient astronaut genre
of ufology and even the most illiterate of
ufo buffs will know this if only through
brief exposure to the old 1972 Chariots
of Gods documentary and various His-
tory Channel knock-offs of it. Most writ-
ers that speak of it are satisfied to give a
quick wave to the whirlwind verse, even
quote it. Several though spent enough
time trying to read the story in the origi-
nal Bible-ese and point to one or another
of the other miracles in the story to try to
add flesh to the extraterrestrial bones of
dancing contentions. The healing and
resurrection of the widow’s son is a fa-
vored way to show the presence of ad-
vanced knowledge and is liked by those
who prefer their aliens to be good and
space-brotherly. The control of weather
impresses the more paranoid fraction of
ufology. The fire raining down from heav-
en reminded one 70s ufo buff of the na-
palm bombs that had lately rained down
on Vietnam. Betty Andreasson singled
out for comment how impressed she was
that Elijah could “call for firepower from
the sky upon occasion.” Another buff felt
it was scientific to suggest God’s fly-by of
the cave fit familiar ufo patterns. Barry
Downing deployed Star Trek anti-gravity
beams for parting waters in Exodus and
realized he should mention Elijah and El-
isha if he did that. Zecharia Sitchen in Di-
17
vine Encounters (1995) offers what must
be the fullest re-telling of the tale, buying
it all from the widow’s never-ending, nev-
er-spoiling food supply to Elisha’s inherit-
ing super-powers. I’m not saying Sitchen
explains it. In point of fact he is quite si-
lent about how he euhemerizes the story,
neither deploying technobabble to nor-
malize the miracles nor providing higher
reasoning rationale for the (seemingly?)
immature and petty narcissism on dis-
play by the theoretically almighty alien.
Unsurprisingly, nobody notices, forget
explains, that scene where the Almighty
forgives the father, but promises evil will
befall his son. See no evil, space-bro’s.
Nor does the success of the prophet’s
prediction concerning Ahaziah seem to
bother ufologists who surely know by
now that predictions involving the ufo
phenomenon and its alleged messen-
gers robustly fail, and universal-lawlessly
so when it predicts something as impor-
tant as a king’s early death.
I feel I should also mention a freaky bit
of trivia somehow missed by modern ex-
traterrestrial euhemerists. When Greeks
translated the story they were mildly puz-
zled about the expression Tishbite and
assumed it referred to some place with a
name like Tishbe that was somewhere in
Gilead. Modern scholarship is pretty sure
there was no place with the name Tishbe
anywhere so far as they’ve been able de-
termine. You’re welcome, mystagogues;
albeit the absence of a ‘z’ can be pointed
to as not perfectly ideal.
Given the wide acceptance of Elijah’s fiery
whirlwind among ufo buffs and ancient
astronaut writers, Aubeck and Vallee
could hardly relegate it to their chapter
on spurious tales in their book of inexpli-
cable wonders. They put the story on their
official chronology just after Akhenaten –
entry #3. This would not merit attention
or even interest, but for a topically famil-
iar error. They title the entry Abduction
of Elijah. Yet Elijah knew God was picking
him up. Aubeck and Vallee even quote
the relevant lines showing expectation:
“Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be
taken away from thee.” The presence of
consent is confirmed when the pair cross
the River Jordan’s parted waters. One
doesn’t even need to decide if the parting
was due to an anti-grav beam or merely
wizardly psychokinesis. He approached
his launch site with full knowledge that
he was leaving for heaven.
That said, Aubeck and Vallee did tell the
story right otherwise and even provided
some insightful comments. They add that
Elijah was the only Old Testament proph-
et taken up to heaven while still alive.
Jews await his return and set a goblet of
wine out at Passover in reminder of this
belief. It’s a good thing to remember if a
certain prophecy in the Book of Malachi
is true: “Observe I will send you Elijah the
prophet before the coming of the great
and dreadful day when the proud and
wicked shall burn as an oven, so I do not
come and smite the earth with a curse.”
(condensing and paraphrasing chapter
4) They also point out Mormons believe
Elijah appeared to Joseph Smith in 1836.
It’s probably okay if you suspect the Mor-
mons made a mistake somewhere.
That title categorizing the case as ab-
duction instead of contact, though…. It
worried me that the same sort of mistake
was happening as happened with Etana
being somehow a classical abductee. It
puzzled me mightily for a time – could it
be a habit? – but it dawned on me that
they didn’t care about the presence or
absence of consent, but the presence of
a standard wonder of abduction mythol-
ogy: miraculous ascension.
by Martin Kottmeyer
T he image, I trust, is familiar to all con-
sumers and followers of ufo culture.
A human, tacitly an abductee, is seen in
the air between a flying saucer and the
ground and implicitly ascending within
a beam of light that shines down from
the alien craft. I am unsure if the image
deserves to be called iconic, but it seems
to appear frequently enough to ponder
whether the designation is appropriate.
Certainly no ufo buff could or would want
to deny the image has become part of
our general understanding of how aliens
bring humans into their preferred place
of business. We could cite chapter and
verse from the writings of Budd Hopkins
and fellow abduction advocates if we
needed to be pedantic here, but, for the
moment, the more interesting point is
that artists and illustrators for the ufo mi-
lieu treat the image as part of our cultural
vocabulary. Within days of starting to
write about Elijah’s ‘abduction’ I was flip-
ping through a book catalog and found
the image abstracted into a stick figure
cartoon that was part of the advertise-
ment for a 2012 calendar. I thought back
to earlier in the year when I found myself
admiring a version of the ufo ascension
ray image in a set of pornographic comics
collected by a fellow ufo researcher. I re-
sist saying the image is ubiquitous since
one should reserve that word for images
of Grays or jokes about anal probes. Yet
it does seem to have some quality of in-
creasing visibility in the fog of contempo-
rary culture.
For the purposes of this essay I am term-
ing this image ‘miraculous ascension.’ In
18
part that is because I have not found any
pre-existing term of general usage for it
and this coinage captures the essential
wonder that all involved are trying to
evoke. This is something clearly outside
of everyday working reality and violates
our commonsense understanding of how
organic bodies interact with gravity and
light. Human beings do not float above
the ground without wires, helicopters,
jetpacks, or giant pterodactyls provid-
ing resistance against the force of grav-
ity. If the person was in a car or plane one
might plausibly theorize the saucer was
using magnetic force to raise the metallic
objects they were traveling in. But even
that is actually outside conventionally
experienced reality and essentially a wild
extrapolation. Ascension of human bod-
ies is quite properly termed miraculous
since there is no way to justify it by physi-
cal law as taught in school or by common
experiences.
It is – let’s be clear – a very separate mat-
ter whether one can justify it by extrapo-
lating possibilities available to technolo-
gies which will come online in our distant
future, or, on distant worlds in the pres-
ent, evolved to owning futuristic tech-
nology. Hopkins and Rainey proposed
one might justify reports of miraculous
ascension in abduction via diamagne-
tism. Organic molecules can sometimes
be made to form magnetic fields when
placed inside a strong enough magnet-
ic field and provide lift with attracting
fields. This has actually been done with
frogs. A photo exists showing one levitat-
ed within a magnetic field. Skeptics are
obliged to wonder if this can be scaled
up the necessary orders of magnitude
safely. Would anyone dare to attempt
to lift a human being via diamagnetism?
Wouldn’t there be dangerous stresses
to internal organs from different organs
having different forces of attraction?
Could the brain and heart safely function
with magnetic fields pulling neurotrans-
mitters through synapses at odd angles
and speeds? Wouldn’t such fields accel-
erate naturally-occurring atmospheric
ions into dangerously destructive radia-
tion in even short exposure times? And
what would unnaturally strong magnetic
fields do to the metallic objects within
or attached to humans – surgical pins,
plates, meshes, teeth fillings and braces,
ear-rings, piercings, hairpins, bracelets,
necklaces, clothing buttons and zippers,
coins? They would be pulled with forces
that should tear the skin and tissues and
create pressure bruising. And anything
that managed to remain with the victim
would certainly acquire an easily detect-
able remnant magnetism, thus spoiling
the ideal of aliens conducting their secret
operations with only the most ambigu-
ous evidence of their existence.
One might create a field of lifting gravity
by the use of compact matter like that
found in dwarf stars or neutron stars,
but this would inevitably pull up more
than the human. Up goes anything not
nailed down in the vicinity: cats, dogs,
soda cans, tree limbs, bugs, loose dirt,
water. What would be needed is a nar-
row directed stream of gravitons that
can be manipulated and shut off at will.
Even this would require ultradense mat-
ter moving at relativistic velocities and I
doubt anyone (even Forward 1988) be-
lieves that is theoretically plausible or
practical or safe or economical to even
a Dyson-level civilization. Arthur Clarke
(1972) admittedly had some optimism
that anti-gravity might not be absolutely
impossible, but he realized it would re-
quire a breakthrough utilizing concepts
that don’t have any current empirical ba-
sis like negative matter.
With it fully understood that I suspect
no amount of advanced technology will
pull off this particular magic trick, I want
to explore the history of the image. This
will not be a comprehensive assault on
the problem. It would likely take years to
follow all leads and close ambiguities and
gaps apparent to my eye. I invite readers
to fill in the gaps with their own discover-
ies if dissatisfied by the sketchy nature of
this account.
Let’s start with the hopefully banal obser-
vation that miraculous ascension was not
part of the ufo culture at its beginning in
1947, but started appearing some years
later and then merely occasionally at first.
The contactees, starting in the Fifties,
mostly used pedestrian means to enter
the saucers of the Space Brothers. They
either simply stepped through a door
(Orfeo Angelucci, Dan Fry); made a small
step (George Adamski); moved onto a
single moveable step with handrail (Tru-
man Bethurum); walked up a ramp into
an iris door (Howard Menger); walked
up a ramp and stepped down into craft
(Calvin Girvin); climbed up a ramp (Chief
Frank Buckshot Standing Horse); walked
up a stairway (Richard Miller); crept up a
ladder (T. Lobsang Rampa) and, in one in-
stance, drove a car up a ramp and parked
inside the craft (Reinhold Schmidt).
Eddie Bullard’s triplet of ‘first abductions’
– three cases that could not reasonably
have influenced each other – each in-
volved entrances that were prosaic to the
level of vulgarness. Antonio Villas Boas
was wrestled to the ground and dragged,
kicking and struggling up a swaying nar-
row ladder. In the Salzburg abduction,
the victim is paralyzed by a hand-held
device and a plate is strapped to his
chest which allows the abductor to pull
him along with reduced gravity when
the device is pointed his way. In the Hill
abduction, Barney and Betty are sleep-
walked from the car to a clearing where
they take two steps up to a ramp and
enter the saucer via a door on the side.
Betty is curiously able to exhibit a degree
of uncooperativeness. The absence of
consistency speaks loudly and provides
evidence that in the absence of mod-
els, the creative mind kicked in to fill the
void of narrative need. Necessity was the
mother of invention. The scale provided
by hindsight and a history of experienc-
ers exploring alternatives for better ef-
fects, judges the triplet as now obviously
primitive. AVB’s abduction looks uncivi-
lized and clumsy. Salzburg’s plate on the
chest looks clumsy and cartoonish, liter-
ally like the inertron jump belts of Buck
Rogers. Betty’s comments on Barney’s
sleep-walking have the vulgar aura of na-
19
tives in early B-list zombie fliks and serials
like The Lost City where voodoo and mad
scientists routinely sapped the wills of
non-whites to keep slaves and poor folks
docile for their masters.
Analogously down-market measures
were common in many subsequent ear-
ly abductions. After facing a gun, Herb
Schirmer consents to climb a ladder lead-
ing into a central opening in the bottom
of a saucer that retracts with a zoop sound
effect. In the daSilva abduction, the vic-
tim’s legs are painfully paralyzed when a
ray gun is fired at them and the abduc-
tors drag him while carrying him under
the armpits. Charles Moody scuffles with
some grays and hurts his back which the
aliens partially heal by a rod-like device.
Even as late as the Gulf Breese abductions
(1988), Ed Walters reported a brutal inci-
dent where he was encircled by a crowd
of 10-20 shielded Grays with shock sticks
who flit around him like jumping spiders.
They physically struggle with him while
he resists like an enraged bull. He throws
sand at them and gets one in a strangle-
hold. He remarked it smelled of mildew.
To distract him, they put an image in his
mind of them taking his sister. He is ren-
dered paralyzed and unconscious as the
lead alien remarks “You are always like
this.”
As far as my research has been able to de-
termine, the first appearance of miracu-
lous ascension in ufo culture belongs to
one of the lesser contactees named Dan
Martin. He reportedly spoke at several ufo
conventions in the Sixties and authored a
short 17 pp. booklet printed by Saucerian
Press titled Seven Hours Aboard a Space
Ship. Undated, it has been reported in a
separate source that it was written prob-
ably in 1957. It went through several
printings.
As he tells it, one day there was a knock
on his door and two ordinary-seeming
people tell him they want to take him on
a journey in a spaceship that will be in-
teresting and helpful to him. He would
be returned in 7 hours. If he was ready,
they’d do it right then and there. He locks
up his house, walks between the pair, and
they grasp his arms above the elbow.
As soon as they took hold of my two arms,
we went up; no time was lost. The sensa-
 tion was just like going up in a fast eleva-
tor. It might scare you a little, or make you
feel as if you were being turned wrong
side out. This was the sensation I had. I
looked down and could see the waters of
the Rio Grande River flowing between the
two cities. I knew that we were travelling
fast, as the lights were rapidly becoming
dimmer. I did not have any particular sen-
sation of traveling at this time, only at the
start. It was a matter of minutes until we
were out of sight of the lights of the city
and the river. I began to feel very cold and
knew we were quite high.
As the cold became unbearable he
sensed he was stopping. He looked up
and saw an umbrella-like canopy about
35 or 50 feet in diameter, a scout craft.
They were entering a clear tube in the
center about 4 or 5 feet in diameter. A
spiral shutter opens as they approach
and closes after they enter it. An instant
later a spiral shutter opens at the top of
the tube and they pass into a room of the
craft. It has a television screen, a panel,
and a myriad of instruments, clocks, me-
ters, gauges, knobs, levers. On the panel
screen appeared stars with lines connect-
ing some in geometric patterns. They
stand around ten minutes as the craft’s
operators busy themselves with operat-
ing the instruments.
Eventually the scout ship ferries Dan to
a Mothership 900 miles up. The ship’s
name is the Michiel. It is piloted by Mer-
curians and has been on duty around
Earth for the past 6000 years. He is also
told, “This ship has been instrumental in
performing many of the so-called mira-
cles of biblical and other ancient record,
such as the taking away of one of our an-
cient Biblical characters, Enoch, by name.”
It helped produce Noah’s Deluge, parted
the Red Sea for Moses, created the Star
of Bethlehem vision, and was used to
build the Pyramid at Giza. When Winfield
S. Brownell reprinted parts of Dan Mar-
tin’s booklet for a collection of contactee
writings in 1980, he commented that the
method used in lifting Dan Martin to the
ship could save millions of people in a
worldwide emergency.
Given the Judeo-Christian apologetics
of the tale, there is not much point is
looking outside religion for the primary
inspiration of this instance of ascension.
While contactees clearly get priority for
introducing miraculous ascension to ufo
culture; there are so many details dis-
cordant with later abduction imagery it
seems certain Dan Martin’s tale played no
substantial role in shaping subsequent
instances of ascension. Dan Martin’s
ascension lasted minutes and spanned
miles and the tube with spiral shutters
never repeats elsewhere in ufo history.
The ship lacks Grays and it has excessive
instrumentation which sounds overly 50s
in character and needs tedious tending by
the crew. The panel display having stars
with interconnecting lines maybe paral-
lels the Hill case in a curious way, but this
should probably be dismissed as parallel
invention serving parallel purposes.
A second contactee, Carl Anderson, in au-
tomatic writing dated February 25, 1957,
was contemporaneously being told that
thousands would be rescued from an up-
coming cataclysmic event. “They will be
levitated or lifted up, and taken aboard
the craft you have chosen to call FLYING
SAUCERS.” But only if they are people
with positive vibrations.
My research suggests the first abduction
experience to involve miraculous ascen-
sion belongs to the Canadian case of Da-
vid Seewaldt dated November 19, 1967.
Seewaldt was a young boy at the time
and the story he told is strikingly brief by
current standards.
They put a beam on me… I was sort of in
a trance. It pulled me up into the ship.
Inside the ship he is put on a table,
wheeled through a computer room, un-
dressed and studied by aliens. Though
investigated promptly, Seewaldt’s expe-
rience was not reported in the ufo litera-
ture until 1974 because the experience
seemed to be merely a nightmare and of
no innate credibility. Investigators only
decided to write it up after reading of
the 1973 Pascagoula abduction and find-
ing a curious similarity between the two
accounts. Seewaldt’s description of the
miraculous ascension is entirely quoted
above and is so short and lacking in detail
one could easily miss it if you skimmed
the paper. The investigators make no
comment about the detail either. They
were mainly interested in the look of the
abductors.
The 1973 Pascagoula abduction, though
20
lacking our defining image, needs to be
partly described here. There is no mi-
raculous ascension episode per se, but
the alien dream kinetics look relevant. As
Charles Hickson tells it, the entities that
captured him floated above the ground
and when they touched him, he felt
lighter himself. Hickson’s sensations on
transport were confessed as paradoxical.
He sensed he was moving forward, but
he had no sensation of his feet walking or
dragging on the ground, nor of the enti-
ties lifting him – “it’s just a feeling I can’t
explain.” Calvin Parker explicitly used the
word floating to describe his feeling dur-
ing his transport to the craft. They enter
the craft through an opening on the side.
While being examined by a crystal or
mechanical eye, Charlie feels he is float-
ing, suspended in the air without a table.
The case was very high profile and cases
of people being floating to and/or from
crafts slightly above the ground would
recur in several subsequent cases, nota-
bly the Pat Roach, Sandra Larson, Sara
Shaw, and Betty Andreasson cases.
The next case possibly exhibiting miracu-
lous ascension is the Dionisio Llanca case
of October 28, 1973. Set in Argentina,
Llanca was working on a tire when he
was grabbed from his kneeling position
and forced upright. Consciously, he re-
members 2 men and a woman in yellow
boots. One takes a sample of blood from
his finger and he remembers fainting and
nothing more. When regressed and un-
der Pentathol additional details emerged
that included reportedly:
Then he related how he was taken by the
men of the party to an object above the
trees beside Highway 3. He was transport-
ed to it “by means of a light.”
It needs to be granted there is a degree
of ambiguity here. This could be inter-
preted as actually teleportation involv-
ing dematerialization rather than vertical
motion through the air. The Llanca case,
we must point out, is regarded as a hoax
by ufologists of Jerry Clark’s generation
these days. But this was not the situa-
tion in the 70s and accounts of Llanca
appeared in places like Saga’s Ufo Maga-
zine.
The ‘ultimate’ abduction of Bill McGuire
and Nora Johnson straddles the border-
line of relevance. In regressions stretch-
ing from 1974 to ’75, Nora reports that as
a ufo approached their car she felt herself
go numb then felt disoriented. In some
incredible way she senses herself mov-
ing and simultaneously seeing a shadow
of herself going up into the air. The in-
vestigator notes this seems like either an
out-of-body-experience or astral travel,
not physical transport. She finds herself
drifting toward the ufo, see grasshopper
aliens through the windows and slips into
complete hysteria. Suddenly she recalls
being inside the ufo, lying in a chair. Bill
seems to experience a less ambiguous
version of miraculous ascension. As the
ufo approaches, he has “a tingly feeling,
like something’s not right.” He experienc-
es something pulling at him, trying to lift
him. He has seat belts on. He has a sen-
sation of panicking, then he feels himself
floating. He looks down and can see the
top of the car. When asked what is hold-
ing him, he indicates he doesn’t know. He
next senses being set down somewhere
and next sitting inside the dome of the
ufo. Though the presence of ascension
is less ambiguous than Nora, the issue of
the seat belt is never addressed. Did he
unconsciously unfasten it and a physical
ascension take place or did it remain fas-
tened and, like Nora, it was a psychic or
spirit-body-only ascension?
The January 4, 1975 Carlos Diaz abduc-
tion in Argentina seems more firmly
within our defined boundaries. Af-
ter leaving the Holy Protective Society
where he waited on tables for a living, he
went home by bus. Walking from the bus
stop he crosses a railroad yard and sees a
broken flash of light that blinds him. No
clap of thunder follows however. Next
he hears a humming sound comparable
to rushing air. He feels himself pulled off
the ground. Around 8 feet off the ground
he blacks out. He awakes inside the
craft and sees creatures with featureless
round heads that even lack eyes. Their
arms have grasping suckers. They pull
at his hair, both on his head and chest.
He faints again and awakes lying in the
grass. This was featured in the Lorenzens’
Encounters with UFO Occupants (1976)
in a chapter collecting cases of floating
entities and flying little men. Several are
set in South America and provide a sort
of corroborative background to the Diaz
case, showing instances of levitational
flight was not idiosyncratic to him alone.
Diaz would offer photographs of ufos
in support of his claims, but they are re-
garded as fraudulent.
In a regression dated October 8, 1975,
Brian Scott seems to report an ascen-
sion type event while approached by a
disk with a strange light. He feels held in
some sense.
Can move but can’t get away! Up--- up.
Mountains behind us--- a room--- door
opens.
In a Saga Ufo magazine article the scene
is rendered in this fashion:
An enormous UFO appeared and glided
silently toward him…There was tranquil-
izing beauty in the purple light sparking
from beneath the object. In seconds the
UFO was directly overhead, and appar-
ently generated what Scott described as
a “pulling sensation.” The next thing he
knew, he was inside the craft.
This is certainly suggestive of miraculous
ascension, but the detailing is slight and
less than ideal. We’d like to actually hear
he is in the air and moving toward the
UFO.(Gutilla & Frazier 1977) Alvin Law-
son’s investigation turned up evidence
the case was a hoax.
The Liberty, Kentucky triple abduction
is set in January 1976. Initially the ex-
perience involves three women seeing a
ufo with a beam of light and then losing
control of the car. As she tries to speed
forward, it is dragged backwards over a
cattle grate and into a farm. Missing time
is experienced. Under hypnosis some
months later she remembers the car be-
21
ing sucked up into the ufo.
In a March 22, 1976 incident, Sara Shaw
adds a variant that while she was initially
floated towards the ufo like she moving
on a conveyor belt, at a certain point she
sees she is standing on a tilted beam of
light then kind of walking up it while si-
multaneously it conveys her upward like
an escalator. While this has an obvious
similarity to the light bridge that Flash
Gordon walks on at one point in the
movie serial from 1936, the upward tilt is
quite novel.
In the July 1976 issue of Official UFO we
learn of the attempted abduction of Se-
bastian Acevado in Tandil, Argentina on
April 14, 1974. Acevedo is walking to
work in the early morning hours when
he sees a star coming down and a pow-
erful illumination suddenly surrounds
him. He turns around to see machine 2
meters in diameter and shooting flames
from its edges positioning itself over-
head. It emits a sound like a thousand
welding machines. A trap door in the
center opens up like the saloon doors in a
western. A concentrated red light beam
shines out and paralyzes him. It lifts him
off the ground twice to an altitude of 30
to 40 centimeters as if trying to suck him
in but failing in the attempt. The light
beam ends sharply before reaching the
ground, an effect certain ufologists dub
‘solid light.’ The heat given off by the ma-
chine feels like the ovens of a steel mill.
The incident ends quickly having lasted
mere seconds, certainly under a minute.
A watchman at the nearby cheese fac-
tory rushes towards him, having been
alarmed by the light and sound and fear-
ing a transformer might have caught fire.
The machine rose, made a turn like an
aircraft, and followed power line cables
some distance seeming to make contact
and causing a flash at one point. Police
were called and took him to a hospital
where they diagnosed him as having
a nervous crisis. Investigators subse-
quently learn that a high-voltage cable
had fallen to the pavement where the
ufo made contact and a fire had broken
out in a transformer step-down substa-
tion. Officials blamed the down cable
it on high winds. The Official UFO issue
article is accompanied by an illustration
which is the earliest magazine drawing of
a miraculous ascension into an ufo I have
found. It would not surprise me if earlier

July 1976 illustration
examples exist and I ask any reader who
can provide any to let me know.
Watching Escape from Witch Mountain
in 1975, Judy Kendall comes to the scene
where a camper magically flies skyward
and she suddenly has spontaneous recall
of her own car having been floated sky-
ward. In a regression in January 1977 she
recalls driving along when the steering
goes unresponsive she feels like she and
the car are floating with the road sudden-
ly gone and there is blackness around
and beneath her. “I don’t know where the
road went.” It is tacit there was no light
beam associated with the lifting.
The May 1977 issue of Official Ufo fea-
tures another early illustration of ascen-
sion, albeit the case it is based on does
not actually warrant it. A person named
Womack sees a thick beam of light slowly
drop down from a ufo to a meadow. It
seemed denser than light. He starts to
run but then is hit by a red light. Next
thing remembered is being inside a ufo.
Womack does not specifically say any-
thing about experiencing being in the
air. The text is ambiguous since it is con-
sistent with instant teleportation.
In 1978, a Disney flik appears called Cat
from Outer Space which, though it fails to
match up with our image, is kinetically in-
teresting since there is a lot of levitation
without light effects. The film includes a
scene of the alien cat levitating a motor-
cycle being driven by the scientist. It is
provocatively reminiscent of E.T., but ob-
viously beforehand. It is, admittedly, far
less dramatic is several respects, notably
the absence of John Williams scoring and
less cinematic emphasis; i.e. no jump-
cutting zoom-in, no silhouette against a
full moon.
In March 1978, William Herrmann sees
an ufo over the Ashley River. The light
flips off and there is a blur of motion and
suddenly it is 10-15 feet in front of him.
A tubular blue-silver or aquamarine haze
of light extends outwards and down-
wards from the bottom. His mind blurs
as a humming sound envelopes him. He
awakes on a table with 3 grays standing
nearby. His memory improves at a later
date to flesh out the moment of abduc-
tion as him being “pulled upwards in a
tugging motion” and he remembers his
hands reflexively going up to protect
himself. He would lose consciousness
soon after it started. In time he learns the
process is called transference beaming
by the aliens. There are a lot of problems
with this case starting with physical evi-
dence that looks almost silly – a poorly-
molded lead ingot with crosses and the
letters MAN scratched into it that the
aliens call a gift, but admit is essentially
worthless from a terrestrial perspective.
In regressions starting in April 1979, Phil-
ip Osborne finds himself rushing toward
a ufo resembling a geodesic dome.
I was hurtling through space and… I just
had the feeling I wanted to put the brakes
on.
Hopkins would add that Osborne sensed
he merged with the object through an
open triangular panel and it actually took
several sessions before Osborne could
get over the disturbing sensation of
headlong flight. Hopkins reported that
the hypnotist preferred to regard the
image as a metaphorical expression of
feeling out of control. The scary rush to
the saucer with things zooming by the
abductee recalls a scene in the film God
Told Me To (1975) of a woman abducted
up and backwards towards a flying sau-
cer in a surprising rush. The film’s ascen-
sion is also nonclassic in the angle being
non-vertical, there is no associated light
beam, and the craft is not a saucer; re-
22
sembling Space 1999’s Eagles, only larg-
er. The kinetics of the case is ontologically
the centermost problem and demands
unbelief. By what sort of force is Osborne
propelled to the craft and braked with-
out slamming into the saucer wall with
no talk of safety netting?
In a regression dated May 30, 1979. Lori
Briggs initially sees creatures floating. “It’s
their light… their light has lots of power.”
She describes them elevate things with
light. “It points its hands at things, lifting.”
The thought that this echoes the power
of Uncle Martin in the 60s sitcom My Fa-
vorite Martian comes easily to one of my
generation. All kids my age pretended to
be able lift things by remote control in
mimicry of him. More closely contempo-
raneous, in “The People” (1971) a teacher
experiences telekinetic ascension several
feet above the ground accompanied by
an alien’s hand glowing with light.
Lori experiences the alien lifting with this
light. Her journey to an ufo happens too
quickly to see the exterior of the ufo and
she recalls being surrounded by light
during the transport. This may count as
pedantic, but let’s also state the obvi-
ous: Actual light only exerts pressure in
the direction it moves and light power-
ful enough to move humans via kinetic
energy would also likely burn the skin
severely.
On August 21, 1980, Megan Elliott is re-
turning home from a short visit to her
mother. Megan’s daughter had been
screaming due to a painful medical con-
dition. Near Lake Fork Creek her radio
acts up, automatically switching across
stations, and the headlights start to die.
A painfully loud electrical noise enve-
lopes the car and it is lifted up into a giant
flying saucer bearing two rows of bright
lights. This is a tractor beam situation and
obviously parallels the 1976 Liberty, Ken-
tucky and Judy Kendall cases.
Some major films in the early 80’s could
be said to have pulled levitation to the
top shelf of the cultural tool-box. E.T.
(1982) provided a magical moment
where a boy is riding a bicycle and is lift-
ed skyward to pass in front of the moon
implicitly by E.T.’s magical power of will.
No ufo ray involvement was implied. Co-
coon (1985) has aliens of a roughly gray
form that levitate when in their light bod-
ies and a large boat filled with oldsters is
vertically ascended into a giant saucer at
the finale with a soft helical column of
light. In the 1988 sequel Cocoon 2: The
Return, we see a curious variation at the
finale where the oldsters are transformed
into balls of light and ascend up a beam
of light in that state, presumably a meth-
od made possible by their prior associa-
tion with the Antarean beings of light.
The TV series Greatest American Hero
(1981-3) does a twist on the Superman
legend where alien super-powers like
flight can be acquired through a suit, but
the catch is that one needs an instruction
book to understand it and this is immedi-
ately lost. The Mothership is seen to cast
a vertical beam of light in the premiere
episode and the title sequence of each
episode thereafter.
On November 11, 1987 in Gulf Breeze,
Florida Ed Walters purportedly sees and
photographs a large craft rather like the
mothership in Greatest American Hero.
It pulls overhead and a blue beam of
light lifts him four feet above the pave-
ment, while simultaneously pictures of
dogs are being flashed into his mind. The
beam shuts off and he falls four feet to
the pavement below. His wife drove up
and could smell the cinnamon and am-
monia odor left on her husband. They
felt there was no doubt they had tried to
abduct him. The photos appear in the lo-
cal paper and the long saga of the Gulf
Breeze controversy begins.
Two years later, on November 30, 1989,
Dan & Richard are said to witness Linda
Cortile / Napolitano in a full white night-
gown “float-
ing in midair in
a bright beam
of whitish blue
light, looking
like an angel.”
There are 3
grays escorting
her. After en-
tering through
the bottom
of the ufo it
plunges into
the river be-
hind the Brook-
lyn Bridge. Her
personal ac-
count describes
the ascent as
feeling “she levitated gently upward in (played by Veronica Cartwright) lifted up
the brilliant, bluish white beam that radi- in a brilliant beam of light off a bridge.
ated from the bottom of the craft.” In the
regression she indicates awkwardness at The decade also saw Visitors of the Night
the nightgown going over her head. An- (November 27, 1995) which was mostly
other major controversy ensues, the up- a fictionalized adaptation of abductions
shot to skeptics being this was another in the Hopkins-Jacobs-Mack lineage. Pro-
probable hoax. motional art for shows a girl in a blue-
white light floating towards a window. A
The Nineties is the decade of the X-Files perhaps trivial landmark is achieved with
(September 10, 1993 – May 19, 2002). In A&E’s DVD box cover for a Chariots of the
its 9 season run there were many epi- Gods knock-off in 1996 which uses mirac-
sodes incorporating ufo mythology and ulous ascension in its art while the con-
conspiracy thought. In “Little Green Men” tents has nothing inside to justify usage
(September 16, 1994 ) we see Mulder’s – a probable indication of marketing that
sister was abducted in a levitating beam uses the image as shorthand vocabulary
of light when they were children and this to tell buyers this is a ufo product.
incident drives Mulder’s persistence in his
ufo investigations. The abduction is done
is Spielbergian fashion with a brilliant
flood of light and a light seen through
venetian blinds. Then we see Samantha
laying in horizontal posture with long
hair flowing down and the body moves
forward through a window, not vertically,
into a reddish-orange shaft of light shin-
ing inward from the side.
The pilot episode involves a boy who sees
a light and is taken to ‘a testing place.’ We
see him in the woods lighted from above
surrounded a whirlwind of leaves, and
a girl he carries with him is taken away
between edits. It is consistent with flash
teleportation. Poor Max Fenig in “Fallen
Angel” (November 19, 1993) suffers sei- Another cultural landmark worth pass-
zures as we see him hanging several feet ing mention is when the Energizer Bun-
up in the air with a vertical blue white ny experiences ascension into a flying
beam of light shining down on him. We saucer he helps jump-start in 2006, the
don’t actually see him being lifted into a repetition surely helped imprint miracu-
craft. He returns in “Tempus Fugit” and lous ascension into virtual banality. Still
“Max” (March 16-23, 1997). “The Red and
the Black” (March 18, 1998) features an
ascension visualized in the closest to con-
temporary form with Cassandra Spender
23
another cultural moment I feel worthy
of comment is the marketing for the film
Skyline (November 12, 2010) which fea-
tures hundreds of humans experiencing
ascension to a giant mothership as part
of its campaign. It is a striking piece of
art and seems the cinematic secular
translation of the Rapture beloved by
evangelists and brings us spiralling back
to Dan Martin and Carl Anderson’s efforts
at religious syncretism. The film does not
disappoint, we should add, featuring nu-
merous extraordinary images, including
an ascension of a man & woman giving
each a final kiss before entering a moth-
ership that seems to promise hell instead
of heaven.
Within the culture of ‘real’ ufo abductions,
after the Linda case, miraculous ascension
approached being a kind of archetype,
something that cases sporadically gravi-
tated towards, but not necessarily arrived
at with consistency. A fair percentage of
abductees dispense with descriptions of
transport from bed to exam table with
the cinematic equivalents of jump-cuts
or dissolves. Some give indications they
are rendered unconscious to make trans-
port simple. A few like Barbara Archer
and Richard Boylan’s subject ‘Ron’ report
miraculous ascension that mimics Lin-
da’s report with no obvious disparities,
though it might surprise you how few
published examples have actually been
given. Variants are easy to find. Will Park-
er, in David Jacobs’’ Secret Life, for exam-
ple, describes vertical ascension with no
material means of support into the bot-
tom of a saucer. He mentions being able
to see the ground, but can’t see it or the
interior of the saucer very well, because
“…it’s kind of dark.” In John Mack’s Ab-
duction book, one subject, ‘Arthur,’ starts
with a conscious memory of a brilliant
light filling the sky and, under regression
recalls being lifted through the roof of
the car, but he adds the odd feature of
something resembling a spiderweb do-
ing the pulling and aliens warning him
not to break it. And the saucer interior is
like Fenway Park upside down.
The history of the image of miraculous
ascension within the total ufo culture
we can broadly complain is a messy af-
fair with many ambiguities and a broad
diversity of one-offs, i.e. things that partly
match our defining image, but lack per-
fect consistency to the present preferred
form. In some degree it feels like the im- are seen almost in silhouette and in dark-
age evolved out of a population of com- ness. This Island Earth (1953) contains a
peting ideas about how best to elicit the solid light lifting beam, but is employed
sense that aliens have a futuristic magical on an airplane in mid-flight. Combined
technology at their disposal after a pe- in Ruff & Reddy, this form of miraculous
riod of confusion on how best to do it. At ascension feels distinctly new, at least to
some level, an awareness must have set these mass media.
in among a certain fraction of claimants
that the initial abductions had involved Science fiction, to be sure, had the basic
techniques that feel too mundane espe- idea decades earlier. It has been reported
cially once fancier techniques showed that Bertrand Meheust began his study
up their literally pedestrian quality. Mi- of the science fiction parallels to ufo my-
raculous ascension is maybe winning the thology when he stumbled upon a copy
cultural battle, but it remains an uphill of the 1908 novel by Jean de la Hire The
struggle. Lightning Wheel in his family’s attic. He
opened it and began reading how the
It can not be much of a surprise to any central characters find themselves be-
ufo buff with a psychosocial perspective ing lifted up by a ray into a flying disc
that miraculous ascension was an idea that hums and glows with a halo of light.
employed by fictional aliens well before The similarity to stories he was reading
it appeared among the ‘real’ aliens of ufo about in ufo literature left him stunned.
culture. A perfect instance of this oc- I’ve seen pulp covers from the 30’s which
curred in an episode of the cartoon series also seem to fit the idea, though I confess
Ruff & Reddy on December 14, 1957. I have not bothered to acquire copies to
determine the exact context provided by
the stories they illustrate.
This image shows Reddy, the dog, being
lifted up through the bottom of a flying
saucer by a beam of solid light, i.e. one
which poses a conical shape whose base
moves visibly up and down instead of ap-
pearing instantly as normal light beams December 1936
do. Ruff, the cat, is abducted shortly af-
terwards by the same method and to-
gether they are shanghai’ed to the metal
world of Muni-Mula where they meet a
big-headed alien who intends to invade
earth with robot clones of the duo. It is,
minimally, the earliest full expression of
miraculous ascension imagery in tv or
film media that I am aware of. Different
aspects of this idea though appear ear-
lier. In The Mysterians (1957) we see 2
women captured by 2 space-suited hu-
mans and we watch them ascending in
pairs up to and through the bottom of
a hovering flying saucer, which though
very close to our image, is imperfect due
to the ascension happening without the
presence of a beam of light. The figures August 1934
24
All the various one-offs we have encoun-
tered in ufo tales – the tractor beams,
alien telekinetic levitation, hand directed
lifting rays, out-of-body astral travel, tele-
portation and dematerialization beams,
etc. – have pulp precursors and parallels.
with rays emitting from it. The structure
yanked upward (obvious from the jag-
ged bottom) was New York’s Woolworth
Building. The contest prompted tales
like an expedition gathering monuments
from an abandoned Earth.

In March 1930 Edward E. Chappelow’s
“The Return of the Air Master” (Air Won-
der Stories, March 1930) speaks of a “trac-
tor ray” lifting machinery through a hole
bored in the ceiling by a different ray. Im-
ages suggestive of lifting rays appeared
on covers as early as December 1926.
These two were drawn for picture con-
tests to lure readers to submit stories and
help fill the pages of Hugo Gerrnsback’s
new zines with fresh stories of techno-
logical wonder:
This April 1936 cover illustrating “The
World of Singing Crystals” is an interest-
ing variant that hints at stability issues
that might predictably exist with usage
of only a single ray.
I have described in detail elsewhere tales
like “The Invaders” (Astounding, June
1935) and “Consulate” (Thrilling Wonder
Stories in 1948) where aliens display levi-
tation of an unexplained sort. “Consul-
ate” speaks of a green bulbous jelly alien
on Mars in these curiously vague terms:
“It didn’t have any wings or jets or any
other way of pushing itself along… It just
happens to be flying.”

Lori Briggs’ directed lifting light has an

obvious precursor in the cover to the
November 1927 Amazing Stories. It illus-
trates Francis Flagg’s “The Machine Man
of Ardathia.” The figure is time traveler
from our far future who has de-evolved
to the point it must live inside a cylinder
and so must use rays to manipulate the
Entities that float above the ground, of- external environment.
ten via such forces as telekinetic levita-
tion, can be found in illustrations for such
stories as Nat Schachner and Arthur Leo
Zagat’s “In 20,000 A.D.” (Wonder Stories
September 1930). It is shows a large-
brained figure floating over a populace in
Earth’s future.

December 1926

Clifford Simak’s “The World of the Red

This November 1929 cover for Science
Wonder has drawn much comment
over the years for being a classic saucer
Sun” (December 1931) similarly involves
Earth’s even more distant future when
the sun has reached the red giant phase.
We can even cite text that reads, “Hang-
ing in the air, suspended without visible
means of support, was a gigantic brain,
approximately two feet in diameter. A na-
ked brain, with the convolutions exposed.
It was a ghastly thing.”
Out of the body astral travel was used
by the narrator in Olaf Stapledon’s Star-
Maker (1937). While flipping through my
pulp cover files I also discovered instanc-
es of what seem to be transport bubbles
and was reminded that Betty Andreasson
had spoken of falling backwards into one
before moving in one alien environment

25
in Andreasson Affair, Phase 2. I seem
to recall Glinda in The Wizard of Oz also
moved around in such a bubble.
April 1957
April 1936
Teleportation and dematerialization we
should brush off by reminding everyone
of such high profile uses before appear-
ing in abduction lore as Star Trek. One
can cite Lost in Space for such things as
solid-light matter transfer beams (“The
Sky is Falling” November 17, 1965 / “Re-
turn from Outer Space” December 29,
1965) and beams that both pull a person
backwards and then flash teleport him
into a spaceship (“Invaders from the 5th
Dimension” November 5, 1965).
Still, there are pulp precedents. The root
category of ‘matter transmission’ was a
staple of pulp era mad science and ap-
pears in dozens of stories. Usually it
existed to get humans or aliens across
interplanetary distances without all the
business necessary to spaceships. Aliens
send plans to build the transmitter and
humans do it, often witlessly unaware of
the downside risks, as in Edmond Hamil-
ton’s “Monsters of Mars” (Astounding Sto-
ries April 1931) when aliens use it to es-
cape their dying world. As early as 1895,
humans are going To Venus in 5 Seconds,
accidentally relayed there when they
reactivate Earth’s pyramid matter trans-
mitter network built by an ancient high
civilization.
I am sure some ufo buffs will gladly point
out all these pulpy precedents are, any-
ways, irrelevant if ancient astronaut au-
thors are right about the gods of myth
and legend being eyewitness accounts
of extraterrestrials wielding magic-level
technology. Miraculous ascension and
levitation all appear in the Bible and oth-
er holy books stretching back to earliest
times. Fiction could be feeding off of an-
cient fact.
These buffs could also point to Aubeck
& Vallee for their strategic interest in re-
garding miraculous ascension as a feat
that shows a robust constancy and as-
sociation connecting both modern and
ancient ufos. This gambit is foredoomed
to failure if it is meant to impress skeptics.
The modern and ancient cases seem to
mutually undermine each other rather of-
fer mutual support. The modern cases are
evidentially poor. Dan Martin is overtly a
contactee, one steeped in religious con-
cerns, and offers a version whose details
match up with nobody else. Seewaldt
is a simple nightmare. Bill & Nora looks
like a spiritual rather than materially real
experience. Llanca, Diaz, and Scott seem
like hoaxes even to serious ufologists.
26
The Herrmann, Gulf Breeze and the Linda
cases are controversial at best and no
self-respecting skeptic could call them
worthy of belief.
Ancient cases of ascension are no bet-
ter. Elijah is just fiction and implying fiery
horses and chariots make a match to ufo
imagery faces large doubts. The Ascen-
sion of Christ may be a central article of
faith among the religious, but historians
are bothered that two of the four Synop-
tic Gospels do not mention it and the two
that do, place it in different geographic
settings. There is also a bothersome
wider context. The ascent of Jesus does
not match up with Elijah; but it bears
interesting similarities to contemporary
legendry surrounding Apollonius (a ma-
gician and Greek contemporary) and a
magician in the Mithras Liturgy. It also
recalls abilities Egyptian magicians could
acquire by conjuring up aerial spirits or
the Lord of the Air. According to the Mag-
ical Papyrus of Paris, “When you die he will
embalm your body as befits a god, and tak-
ing up your spirit will carry it up into the air
with himself.” This Lord of the Air could
also carry you into the air while still living,
bring down stars, bring fire, stop ships in
mid-voyage, shake walls, endow invis-
ibility, and dozens of less ufo-ey miracles.
(Smith 1978)
Aubeck & Vallee make their best stab at
trying to provide a material basis to as-
cension in a case they dug up that is set
around 438 A.D. Constantinople. The city
had just been devastated by an earth-
quake and people had abandoned the
city. As Nicephorus Callistus, a 14th cen-
tury chronicler reported, the people saw
miracle “quite unexpected and beyond
all credence filled them with admiration.”
Amidst a crowd gathered in the country-
side, a child was taken up high into the air
by a strong force, so high they lost sight
of him. He came down and told no less
an eminence than the Emperor, Patriarch
Proclus, that he attended up there a great
concert of the Angels hailing the Lord in
their sacred canticles. The local bishop
Acacius stated, “The population of the
whole city saw it with their eyes.” Baronius
acclaimed this event deserved to be
transmitted to the most remote posterity.
The Greeks inscribed it into their ancient
Menologue and read every year in their
churches. Apparently realizing a 14th
century source for 5th century nameless
miracle might raise eyebrows, Aubeck &
Vallee add in a footnote that more con-
temporary sources exist in two letters to
Peter Fullo by both Acacius and Pope Fe-
lix III (483-492 A.D.) They state that most
details agree except the precise year and
the eventual fate of the child.
Cruelly, I must point out that I no more be-
lieve this tale than I believe the Cheshire
Cat once hovered in the air above a large
crowd of observers and was even seen by
royalty. The sight precipitated a dispute
between King, Queen, and executioner
because only the head of the cat was
visible and the executioner complained
you can’t behead someone who has no
body. Such must be true history as it was
written down in black and white in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. I even saw
illustrations made of the scene. Saying
a crowd saw something is not the same
as demonstrating a crowd of people saw
it. Aubeck and Vallee are going to have
to come up with far more than 2 (unseen
nor reproduced) contemporary letters to
elevate this above the appearance of be-
ing no more than pious fiction spun to
buttress a faith challenged by adversity.
To put the matter brusquely, air travellers
and space travellers in modern times have
been silent about finding angels singing
canticles about the Lord in the breath-
able realms of the atmosphere acces-
sible to material bodies. The three-storey
universe of the Bible had been realized
naïve since at least the times of Galileo.
Indeed a poll of the heads of major Prot-
estant Churches at the start of the space
race asking “Will space explorers discover
God and heaven?” found ALL predicted
‘No.” Aubeck and Vallee’s gullibility over
such airy frothings of the faithful of the
5th century can only make ufo skeptics
groan with disbelief.
Other instances of ascension collected
by Aubeck & Vallee speak of a child
star-god of Mars ascending with a great
train of silk flowing silk behind him dur-
ing China’s reign of Hsiu [#31]; a King of
Hungary (Stephen Istvan: 975-1038 A.D.)
who claimed to lifted in the heavens by
the hands of angels when he prayed –
sometimes physically, sometimes spiritu-
ally; Mario Omodei (September 29, 1504)
is lifted up and taken to a garden plot
where a vision of Mary looking age 14 in-
structs that a temple should be dedicat-
ed to her; a woman executed as a witch
in 1557 Jacquemine Deickens consorted
with the devil and claimed to fly to a
crossroads where she met other witches
every three or four weeks [#186: “flying
contactee” not abductee say our ethno-
semioticians; presumably defensively]; a
Swiss farmer lifted in the air and dropped
two weeks later in Milan, Italy stripped
not only of clothes and saber, but every
hair on his head and face and attributed
to abducting fairies. [#202]
Somehow they missed Simon Magus, a
magician said by some to be the first True
Gnostic. After moralizing on the horrors
of existence (like leprosy and the hideous
metamorphoses of breasts with age), he
was reported to have floated skywards
“arms beating like fish gills,” hair and beard
streaming in the wind. The omission is
curious given Aubeck and Vallee’s desire
to point to ancient wonders that had an
impact on history. A sect thought by his-
torians to be based on Simon’s mission
lasted more than twice as long as Akhen-
aten’s sun-worshippers. Early church fa-
thers were disturbed enough by his ideas
to brand Simon ‘the father of all heresies’
in their sermons.
They also miss this compelling mass
sighting of ascension collected by witch
finder Martin del Rio for his massive In-
vestigations Into Magic (1599-1600) said
to have been one of the most influential
guides for lawyers and other authorities
throughout the 17th century in Western
Europe.
In the town of Halle in the diocese of
Utrecht, a wretched woman one day put
her feet in a basin and then jumped out
of it, saying, “Here I jump from the power
of God into the power of the Devil.” The
Devil snatched her away and bore her up
into the air in the sight of many people
who were inside the house and out, carry-
ing her over the tops of forests; and to this
day no one has caught even a glimpse of
her. Johann Caesarius has clearly shown
this was done by magic arts. Certainly I
should think that a word or deed of this
kind would be a most compelling indica-
tion and one which would touch the sus-
pect very closely.
Not to indulge too deeply in the game of
dueling authorities, but this also sounds
more historically impactful and better at-
tested than Aubeck & Vallee’s ascensions.
27
The implications are equally unpalatable
to modern sensibilities where the Devil is
as immaterial as God. It should be added
that del Rio was sophisticated enough to
admit that cases existed where witches
said they had been transported by Sa-
tan through the air, but individuals had
been watching them and saw the person
merely fast asleep and motionless. What
grows before us is a chaotic diversity that
infests every detail in these stories apart
from the single defining point of continu-
ity which is the presence of ascension.
Magical ascension is less a proof of a
robust and constant ufo phenomenon,
than a proof that some things about
dreams and visions tend to recur more
than other things. Ascension possesses
the quality of omnipotence of thought
and violation of ontological rules that
signals the realm of dream and fantasy.
Magical flight is widely recognized as a
common type of dream. Dream interpre-
tation guides dating back to the earliest
appearances of writing offer meanings
to dreams of magical flight. Freud’s fa-
mous book on dreams reports on the
commonness of magical flight and notes
interpreters even before himself thought
there might be some sort of sexual ex-
planation. Men, for example, commonly
have erections during dreams of magical
flight and tingling sensations are also of-
ten present in both males and females. I
have no particular objection to this mode
of explanation.
Another notion worth offering is that the
brain typically shuts down all voluntary
motor functions during dreams. This is a
safety and survival measure since you ob-
viously don’t want the body walking and
running and working and fighting with
the brain in fantasy mode and unaware
of where obstacles and other dangers
might be. With no feedback from the
body, the mind maybe defaults to treat-
ing the absence of limb movement and
sensations from the feet as evidence the
body is in flight. Though attractive, an
obvious problem with this notion is that
sensations of flying can be generated
with psychedelics. The first studies with
DMT in the 50s had one physician report-
ing “I feel exactly as if I were flying…I have
the feeling this is above everything, above
the earth.” (Strassman, 2008) As he pre-
sumably was conscious and not sleeping,
the brain would still have been receiv-
ing signals from the body. Yet DMT ex-
periences also often have people losing
control of the body and the presence of
feelings of leaving the body so it is hard
to judge whether the process that dis-
connects the body in dreams is or is not
being interfered with by the drug.
How best to explain the frequency of
flight in dreams and other unrealities I
am willing to regard as an unsolved mys-
tery, but something that will certainly be
resolved by neuroscience someday with-
out resorting to magical forces and alien
wills with strange designs on humanity.
You can bet your Baals on it.
References
1. Roberto E. Banchs “Los OVNIs y sus
ocupantes” (1980) pp. 153-163.
2. Otto Billig, Flying Saucers: Magic in
the Skies: A Psychohistory Schenk-
man, 1982, pp. 16, 20
3. Joseph M. Brill, “The Sebastian Aceve-
do Encounter” Official UFO 1, #9, July
1976, pp. 24-5, 52-4.
4. Winfield S. Brownell, UFOs: Key to
Earth’s Destiny! Legion of Light,
1980, pp. 130-4
5. Jerome Clark, “The ultimate alien
encounter”, UFO Report, November
1977.
6. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Fu-
ture, Bantam, 1972, pp. 46-60.
7. Lewis Carroll with notes by Martin
Gardner, The Annotated Alice New
American Library, 1974, pp. 112-7
8. Robert Forward, Future Magic, Avon,
1988, pp. 103-32.
9. Peter Gutilla & James Frazier, “Alien
Possession: Strange Saga of Brian
Scott and the UFO Mind Manipula-
tors” Saga UFO Magazine, 4, #3, July
1977, p. 42.
10. William J. Herrmann & Wendelle Ste-
vens, UFO Contact from Reticulum:
A Report of the Investigation Wen-
delle Stevens, 1981, pp. 37, 53, 144,
147, 215
11. Budd Hopkins, Missing Time: A Doc-
umented Study of UFO Abductions,
Richard Marek, 1981, pp. 162-3chap-
ter 7 – “Pittsburgh and the Mountain-
top”
12. Martin S. Kottmeyer, “ A Klassic Ab-
duction Found” The REALL News, 9,
#5, May 2001, pp. 1, 6-7.
13. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Im-
possible: The Paranormal and the
Sacred, University of Chicago Press,
2010, pp. 206-8.
14. P.G. Maxwell-Stewart, Witch-Hunters,
Tempus Publishing, 2005, pp. 22, 30.
15. Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man
First saw the Earth, Yale University,
2008, pp. 129-40.
16. B. Ann Slate, “Againt Her Will: The
Story of the Kendall Abduction” UFO
Report, 7, #6, December 1979, pp.
54-62.
17. Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician
Harper & Row, 1978, p. 162.
18. Rick Strassman, M.D.; Slawek Wojto-
wicz, M.D.; Luis Eduardo Luna, PhD.;
Ede Freska, M.D., Inner Paths to Out-
er Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds
through Psychedelics and Other
Spiritual Technologies, Park St. Press/
Inner Traditions, 2008, pp. 34, 121-6.
19. Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck,
Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained
Aerial Objects from Antiquity to
Modern Times and their Impact on
Human Culture, History, and Beliefs,
Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2010,
pp. 10-11, 57-8.
28
RB-47 update
I t is not anything really new but I would
like to correct a comment I made in
SUNlite 4-1 regarding pilots and mag-
netic bearings. In discussing this with a
military pilot, he stated that the use of
magnetic headings is common. I stated
in my RB-47 articles that I thought it was
unlikely he was following a specific line
of latitude or using a magnetic heading.
It seems, based on what I learned in my
discussion, that it would not be unusual
at all for Chase to pilot the craft using a
magnetic heading. However, I still do not
think it was likely the RB-47 was attempt-
ing to navigate along a specific line of
latitude because the headings listed by
Chase in his UFO report were identified
by him as true and not magnetic. Addi-
tionally, the reports written in 1957 indi-
cate that the flight was not along any line
of latitude but navigating between two
specific locations (Meridian and Waco).
As I stated in SUNlite 4-1, I don’t think
anybody is every going to determine the
exact path the RB-47 flew that morning
without the navigator’s log All we know
is the plane ended up somewhere south-
east of Dallas when it decided to pursue
the UFO.
 Another empty wa-
ter pistol?
I n late February, news was released that
earth-shattering evidence had surfaced
that was going to prove, once and for all,
that UFOs are actual unidentified craft op-
erating under intelligent control. Did this
evidence appear in a scientific journal?
Was it announced by qualified scientists?
Were all the world leaders informed?
The answer to all three of these ques-
tions seems to have been “no”. Instead,
a retired general, who heads an organi-
zation called the Comité de Estudios de
Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (The Com-
mittee for the study of Anomalous Aerial
Phenomena - CEFAA) revealed this news
at a..sigh...UFO conference.
CEFAA
C EFAA is a sub group of Chile’s version
of the Federal Aviation Administra-
tion. Believe it or not, the Chilean gov-
ernment (using their tax payer’s money)
actual funds the research being done by
CEFAA. CEFAA, like the privately funded
American counterpart, NARCAP, uses the
argument that they are trying to protect
aircraft from collisions with Unidenti-
fied Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Despite
there being little evidence that UFOs/
UAPs have actually caused any aircraft
accidents, UFOlogists at CEFAA/NARCAP
have managed to present this argument
in order to get funding (either privately
or from the government).
CEFAA was first created in the late 1990s
but seemed to disappear from view
around 2003. By 2009, they found some
support and the organization was “reac-
tivated”. Collecting a paycheck from the
tax payers of Chile’, retired General Ri-
cardo Bermudez heads this group of UFO
enthusiasts.
The videos
T he news was announced in several
forums that General Bermudez spoke
at the conference and presented very im-
portant evidence. On February 28th, Billy
Cox mentioned Bermudez appearance
but did not mention the videos. Cox,
would then write on the 2nd of March
that Bermudez presented evidence of
other incidents at the conference but still
One of the UFOs that was recorded at the air show. This is what skeptics have been dreading?
did not mention the videos.
The first appearance of the video was in
article written on March 5th in the Open
Minds blog by Antonio Huneeus. Accord-
ing to the article, General Bermudez stat-
ed that multiple videos were shot from
multiple locations of UFOs during an air
show at El Bosque on 4 November 2010.
It was stated that astronomers and other
skeptical scientists had analyzed the vid-
eos and used technology to measure the
infrared signature of the UFO. Addition-
ally, the Chilean Air Force analyzed the
videos along with Dr. Bruce Maccabee
and Dr. Richard Haines. We were told
that all agreed that the object(s) were un-
identified aerial phenomenon and that
it was flying at high speeds through the
camera’s field of view. Most importantly,
it was noted that the UFOs were not visu-
ally seen by anyone during the air show.
It was only after the show was complete
that people, who shot the videos noticed
these objects passing in front of or near
the aircraft.
Wild Fire
I heard of the videos through the grape
vine around March 12th about the same
time the Huffington Post ran an article by
Alejandro Rojas. A quick search of the
internet revealed a clip that recorded
during the UFO congress, which was very
brief, and some frame grabs of the UFOs
that appeared in Rojas’ article. I was not
impressed and they looked like balloons,
29
bugs, or birds to me.
The next day, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blu-
menthal, published a more extensive ar-
ticle for the Huffington Post. Kean, who
seems to believe just about anything UFO
proponents tell her, took the ball and be-
gan to promote the case as the case UFO
skeptics have been dreading.1
It was revealed that there were seven vid-
eos taken from seven different locations
and that the eight scientists examining
the video determined that the object
was flying at around 4000 mph. These
scientists also determined that it was not
a bird, plane, meteor, or any other known
natural phenomena. Therefore, it was
concluded the object was something
really exotic. A better quality video was
presented showing jets with the UFOs
highlighted for the viewer.
Billy Cox would describe these UFOs as
toying with the aircraft. He also stated
that this “flying saucer” was “mocking” us.
If they really wanted to “mock” us, they
probably would have stood still for every-
one to see and not flit about in an effort
not to be seen. Cox seems to have drawn
his conclusions but what were the skep-
tics saying?
Skeptic’s initial comments
A lan Boyle wrote the first skeptical ar-
ticle on the subject on March 15th in
his Cosmic Log. Dr. Phil Plait was not that
convinced by the video because it only
showed some small object that had to be
pointed out to the viewer. Robert Sheaf-
fer made a few joking comments about
he was “shaking” but then added that
the videos needed to be looked at closer.
He predicted that an explanation would
probably surface but it would not be ac-
cepted by those wanting it to remain un-
explained. I was also quoted late in the
article from my initial observations I had
made after seeing the first video and ar-
ticles that had been written.
I am very skeptical of this story the more
I read it. There are no high-quality vid-
eos available, and the frame grabs/brief
clips I have seen appear to be vague and
indistinct. The idea they may be birds,
insects or possibly a small Mylar balloon
has crossed my mind but I can’t tell much
from the data at hand.
There are some big red flags for me:
1) This happened over a year ago and peo-
ple are still working on analyzing this? If
the evidence was truly that good, it would
take a few months at best to come up with
a reasonable analysis to demonstrate it
was something not of this earth.
2) It is being leaked out to various UFO
blogs instead of publishing in a scientific
journal. If it were good evidence, that is
where it would appear, and not the Huff-
ington Post.
3) The videos are unavailable to be ana-
lyzed from outside sources. Perhaps they
learned from the Mexican Air Force video
debacle. Once the videos were revealed in
sufficient length, many people identified
the source of the images as being from oil
wells in the gulf. A lot of people had egg
on their face from that one. NARCAP was
initially involved with that one, but then
later stated they could not properly ana-
lyze the video because of the provenance
being questionable or some excuse simi-
lar to that.
4) The videos have no provenance. We
don’t know what has been done to them
since the day of the event.
Just my thoughts on this one. I can prob-
ably come up with a few more red flags,
but I would rather wait for the report
to appear or the raw videos to surface.
Meanwhile, I will hit my snooze button
while the UFOlogists proclaim it the latest
‘smoking gun.’ So far all of these ‘smoking
guns’ have turned out to be empty water
pistols that have never fired a squirt.1
I was criticized for comment number 2
suggesting that the report be published
in a scientific journal because there is no
such thing for UFOs. The reason I stated
this was because peer review is some-
thing critical to this sort of thing. Quali-
fied individuals who are independent of
the analysis need to examine the work for
errors and determine if the conclusions
are justified. CEFAA is not independent
and should not be the governing body
that determines if the analysis was cor-
rect. There are journals associated with
optics and photogrammetry that could
apply in this situation.
Instead of a presentation in a scientific
journal for this sort of analysis, the infor-
mation was slowly dribbled out with bits
and pieces here and there at a UFO con-
ference and by pro-UFO writers meant to
promote the results. At the time of my
comment, no full report has been pre-
sented showing methodologies, results,
and conclusions even though it has been
suggested that such reports have been
written. To date, the reports still have not
seen the light of day and I seriously doubt
that they ever will. Most scientists would
laugh at such a method of presentation.
However, this is UFOlogy, where cutting
corners is allowed and it is all about the
hype.
Additionally, we only saw edited videos,
which is why I made the comments re-
garding points 3 and 4. This would be-
come important later on, when some
of the videos presented by Kean on her
web site were of low quality and had slow
frame rates, which would induce unwant-
ed blur in the images.
Boyle’s article took some heat from UFO
proponents because he picked up the
initial suggestion by some forums that
these UFOs were nothing more than in-
sects flying through the field of view.
UFO Updates, which supposedly contains
some of the best and brightest minds in
UFOlogy, declared the comments made
in the article were “Fatuous”. One can
only assume that they were referring to
the potential solutions and commentary.
30
It is interesting that most of the skeptics
(including myself ) wanted to see more of
the videos and examine them further be-
fore drawing some conclusions. On the
other hand, proponents appeared to be
accepting what they were told by CEFAA
without questioning it. This would be
nothing new for the UFOlogical crowd. I
saw similar comments during the Mexi-
can Air Force FLIR video in 2004. UFOlo-
gists have difficulty learning from their
past mistakes.
The house of cards
B oyle’s article brought me to the Above
Top Secret forum, which was light
years ahead of me in analysis of these
video clips. I had to read through dozens
of pages of exchanges to see how oth-
ers had interpreted the videos. I thought
about signing into the forum but decided
I had little to offer that had not already
been discussed. I also had some other
distractions that would not allow me to
devote 100% of my time to the discus-
sion. So, I decided to monitor the ex-
changes and document what transpired.
It is important to note that no prominent
skeptics were involved and this forum de-
serves a great deal of the credit for what
they discovered.
March 14th
The original post in the thread was made
by SHINO pointing towards the videos.
Almost immediately member GREY580
suggested it was a bug. This brought
forth the comments by several members
that bugs can not explain the fact that it
was recorded by seven different videos
from seven different locations. They also
pointed out that it had been analyzed by
scientists, who could tell if it was a bug
or not.
March 15th
Member GLONTRA pronounced this
video as the “end game” and it was de-
finitive proof of UFOs (aka alien space-
ships). CHADWICKUS cautioned mem-
bers and posted several examples of
videos showing these types of UFOs,
which were bugs. THEGUT also mirrored
CHADWICKUS’ comments concerning
caution about all these videos, which
nobody had seen. GLONTRA once again
pointed out when all these videos were
presented, we would finally have “dis-
closure”. SAVEDONE noted the problem
with nobody seeing the UFOs during the
event, which indicated they may be bugs
or birds. UFOGLOBE began to conclude
that these were nothing more than bugs
unless somebody could demonstrate
otherwise. UFOGLOBE would then de-
molish the claim that an infrared analy-
sis (which can’t be done with a standard
video camera) showed the UFO emitting
heat. THEGUT would note that the As-
tronomer Barrera, who was quoted, did
not state they had eliminated bugs.
March 16th
At this point, the pro-argument was that
analysis by experts ruled out mundane
explanations and, even though nobody
mentioned it, that should include bugs.
On the other side of the coin, various
individuals were stating they look like
bugs. UFOGLOBE became the primary
voice on this and would point out why
the video does not show a bug because
of motion blur, compression, and focus,
which would make a bug appear disc
shaped. As an example, UFOGLOBE post-
ed a link of a video somebody shot of a
toy quadrocopter, which was attacked
by a swarm of bees. The bees looked a
lot like the videos in the El Bosque event.
Analysis by UFOglobe indicated the dis-
placement of the object between frames
would agree with the bug hypothesis.
ELEVENAUGUST would point towards
Dr. Dil’s blog entry concerning BLURFOs
(Birds and bugs blurred into appearing
as UFOs). He also posted numerous ex-
amples of his BLURFOs. There was a lot
of arguing about how it would be impos-
sible for all seven videos to record the
same bug. However, UFOGLOBE (among
others) would suggest that it is very pos-
sible that all 7 videos show bugs but not
the exact same bug. This would give the
impression they were the same object.
Meanwhile, RSF77 noted that the video
being presented was edited. He would
note that there are several different vid-
eos linked together but the editing gave
it the false impression it was one com-
plete video of the same event. LACUNA
would conclude that nothing could be
resolved as long as the other six videos
remained unavailable. JUSTWOKEUP
would e-mail Kean asking about the vid-
eos. She asked for patience and prom-
ised great revelations soon. ORKOJOKER
According to CEFAA and Kean, this image was analyzed by Dr. Luis Barrera and that this shows the heat signature of the UFO and jets. One has
to wonder why, in this image, the exhaust of the jets are blue (cold) and not red (hot) if this was an infrared image. Did the jets shut off their
engines?
would post Kean’s March 16th Facebook
comment where she proclaimed that
real experts had analyzed the videos and
would have figured out if they were bugs
or not. She proclaimed those suggest-
ing the bug hypothesis were “amateurs”,
who should not question CEFAA’s experts
(even though their reports have yet to be
revealed). Kean also pointed out that
some of the seven videos were shot with
cell phones, which meant they were of
low quality!
March 17th
People kept questioning if the six other
videos even existed or that they really
were not of good quality. UFOGLOBE be-
gan to question the Astronomer Luis Bar-
rera’s qualifications for performing video
analysis because of the “pseudo-scientific
flim-flam” infrared image analysis. UFO-
GLOBE also suggested that this was all a
scam by CEFAA to justify its existence.
March 18th
DRDIL was able to contact Dr. Barrera,
who stated he was misquoted when they
declared it an infrared analysis. One has
to wonder where General Bermudez got
this information? UFOGLOBE would re-
spond that the analysis being described
in all of the articles and at the UFO con-
ference was amateurish and pointed out
how they were just using various pho-
toshop effects/tools to try and enhance
31
the image. DRDIL stated that Barrera was
looking for changes in asymmetry in the
images to look for wings beating. UFO-
GLOBE would point out several reasons
why this would not detect insect wings
(such as translucence of the wings, high
beat rate of the wings, size of the wings,
and proximity of the bugs to the camera
introducing blur).
March 19th
On this date, the forum recognized the
video presented by a person by the name
of HOAXKILLER. It was HOAXKILLER’s ef-
forts that began to seal he deal on the
bug hypothesis. In HOAXKILLER’s origi-
nal debunking video, he showed that
one frame of the video that had been
posted in the Huffington Post article
showed the UFO in front of the hills but
was not highlighted. Frames prior to this
had been edited out. However, the frame
showing the UFO in front of the hill put a
fixed distance on the UFO and an upper
limit on its size and speed. Prior to this
it had been assumed that the UFO came
from behind the hill. About the same
time, three videos were posted on Kean’s
web site. These three videos were de-
scribed as the “best” videos of the event.
They also confirmed the observations by
the ATS group that the original video pre-
sented by CEFAA was a combination of
several videos.
Even then, these “original” videos that
were “released”, only had a frame rate of
10 fps and 640X480 resolution. Most vid-
eos are shot at 24 fps, which means the
videos are probably not the originals and
there is data missing from them. One
also must wonder why low quality videos
were presented. Was there something
that CEFAA was trying to hide?
CRIPMEISTER would then post a video
from a 2010 air show in Chile of an F-22
raptor in flight. Buzzing by the raptor was
one of the same type of UFOs recorded in
the El Bosque video. If the UFOs were that
numerous, it seems they would probably
be bugs and not craft of any kind. CRIP-
MEISTER would add that CEFAA was com-
ing off as incompetent and were trying to
legitimize their existence.
March 20th
This was the day that the nails were be-
ginning to be pounded into the coffin
that was the UFO video. HOAXKILLER
took the three videos from Kean’s web
site and found the UFO in more frames.
These frames had been edited out by
CEFAA in their original presentation.
HOAXKILLER discovered that the de-
leted frames showed the UFO transiting
across the foreground of the airstrip. This
was completely consistent with the bug
hypothesis. Most of the proponents of
the ET hypothesis kept falling back to the
analysis by CEFAA and the multiple vid-
eos from multiple locations argument,
which began to appear weak based on
the evidence presented.
March 24th
The house of cards that was the ET Hy-
pothesis finally collapsed when STIVER
posted a new video debunking the case.
He found a video taken of the El Bosque
air show that apparently had not been
analyzed by CEFAA. It showed some of
the same events in the other videos. The
UFO does not appear the way it does in
the CEFAA videos. Instead many BLUR-
FOs appear that look exactly like the CE-
FAA UFOs.
I only know what they tell me
L eslie Kean had taken a lot of heat from
people concerning this video analy-
sis. Had she not thrown out the gaunt-
let about this being a case skeptics were
The red path in this image is the path of the UFO as determined by CEFAA. The Blue extension at the bottom was Hoaxkiller’s discovery of the UFO
as it flew in the foreground. Why did CEFAA’s experts miss this and why did the first video have the frames showing the blue path edited out?
dreading, she might have saved face.
However, she started making promises
like:
Have patience folks. More info will be pre-
sented soon. You can’t draw conclusions
from looking at only one tape. And please
remember, these images have been ana-
lyzed by experts in Chile. Didn’t I empha-
size that enough in my Huffington Post
story? They too thought the footage was
a bug at first, until they collected the other
tapes. It is an insult for you carry on about
this being a bug, when obviously if you
can figure that out so easily, the Chilean
experts would have done the same.2
She also continued to make excuses:
As I did in my book, for the Chilean story
I reported on what the authorities at the
Chilean organization told me. These are
authorities I trust, including a General and
well known scientists. I presented the best
video, and quoted their experts.3
It must be pointed out that she IS a jour-
nalist and she MUST stand by her work.
If it is flawed, she must then look again
and see if it is. If there are problems with
what she wrote, she can then state it was
a mistake. Instead, she basically states
that she never bothers to examine any-
thing closely and only repeats what these
sources tell her. She accepts what they
tell her at face value, which is a recipe for
disaster when it comes to UFOlogy.
Hoping people will forget
W hen Kean finally did produce a re-
sponse, several issues about CEFAA
were mentioned. The first was CEFAA
32
was very busy awaiting for the analy-
sis of the videos to be completed. They
now had other photo analysts, who were
unnamed, looking at the videos. CEFAA
also announced that it was not going to
release any more information until these
analyses were complete. That may be
what they said, but I think there may
have been another motive. They drib-
bled out the information hoping people
would blindly accept it instead of exam-
ining what they presented critically. Ap-
parently, people like HOAXKILLER were
more thorough than their experts, who
may have been seeing only what they
wanted to see. To avoid any more em-
barrassment, they chose not to reveal
any reports or videos and hid behind a
curtain of secrecy. Is this a case of “non-
disclosure”? Isn’t CEFAA a government
organization? If this were the USAF, the
outcries of cover-up and FOIA requests
would have been numerous and Kean
would have been leading the charge.
One has to wonder if Kean has a double
standard for UFO organizations where
they are allowed to keep secrets but the
government is not.
As Dr. Dil put it in his blog, Kean and CE-
FAA seem to have problems describing
their own research. What was considered
a completed study in mid-March has now
turned into an on-going study. What was
considered the best video, is now consid-
ered inadequate for research by others.
Instead of demanding that CEFAA come
clean with their evidence, Kean resorts to
blowing a lot of smoke, hoping that no-
body will notice that her/CEFAA’s original
claims do not stand up to scrutiny.
Kean also decided to talk to a bunch
entomologists to get their opinion.
While she quotes several people, we re-
ally don’t know how many entomolo-
gists were asked to comment. She easily
could have asked dozens and only pub-
lished the comments from those she se-
lected. Kean states she presented them
with the evidence from CEFAA. Missing
in her presentation was the other side of
the argument like the video of the quad-
copter with the swarm of bees, the vid-
eo not provided by CEFAA showing lots
of UFOs in the area, and HOAXKILLER’s
very damning video analysis. Her sum-
mary of what her selected entomologists
stated was it was very probably not a bug.
4
However, that is not what they really
said. They all thought it was unlikely that
it could be bugs but never stated that it
was not a bug (one did but then changed
their statement after discussing it with
another person). We are not even sure if
they had an experience looking at insects
in videos like this. While one can respect
their opinions about insects, that opinion
did not falsify the bug hypothesis as Kean
implied.
Because Kean has nothing more than
what CEFAA originally told her, she keeps
referring to those who upstaged the sto-
ry as “amateurs” even though she does
not know their qualifications! It is clear
that these “amateurs” did a far better job
and were more open with their analyses
than CEFAA and Kean. Now Kean is sim-
ply “tap-dancing” hoping that nobody
will notice that CEFAA never really pub-
lished anything. With the revelations that
the videos probably show bugs, I suspect
CEFAA’s reports will never be revealed.
If Leslie Kean’s hand-picked entomologists think the UFOs in the CEFAA slide shows probably aren’t bugs, why is it that the bees in the video,
Quadcopter attracts a swarm of bees, look so much like the UFOs in the CEFAA videos (see the small box for the UFO seen in the F-16 video for
comparison)?
UFO = alien spaceship?
U FOlogists are great at saying what
UFOs can not be. However, they al-
ways try and walk the fine line in reveal-
ing what they believe. It is best to hint at
what you want everyone to think it is and
then have them draw the obvious con-
clusion. When a skeptic says it is unlikely
the object is an alien spaceship, the pro-
ponent immediately denies ever stating
this as if they are trying to keep an open
mind. This was apparent when Billy Cox
declared that Benjamin Radford was mis-
representing what Kean had written:
Wrote Radford in his Live Science blog:
“Kean and others interpret it as a metal-
lic interplanetary spacecraft.” That isn’t
true. Neither Kean nor Blumenthal nor
anyone in CEFAA stated that in the HuffPo
article.5
Billy Cox is technically correct. They
never said “metallic interplanetary space-
craft” but they did state that it was dome-
shaped, no visible means of propulsion, ap-
pears metallic, emits some form of energy,
extraordinary machine, not man-made,
Humans could not survive these speeds,
and clearly under intelligent control.6 Say-
ing these things is essentially the same
thing as stating metallic interplanetary
spacecraft. Billy Cox, and all the others
who make these kinds of comments, are
just trying to trick people into thinking
they are being objective when they really
are not.
Failing to do it right
M issing from all of these analyses is
the reason for having multiple vid-
33
eos from multiple locations. When that
is done, one can triangulate the posi-
tion of the UFO and determine distance,
size, speed, and altitude. In all of these
wonderful revelations by Kean and Ber-
mudez, there never was any mention of
triangulation. That indicates to me that
they could not perform this since the
UFOs did not align properly. Either there
was more than one UFO present or these
UFOs were bugs. As a result, we get these
analyses using photoshop filters to look
for things that may or may not be resolv-
able.
As a crude exercise in triangulation of
the data available, I used the frame that
showed the UFO at a low enough angle
with the F-16s and compared it to the
video taken from the review stand area
(which is at 30 FPS). As one can see in the
image from google earth on page 34, the
distance between the two videographers
was about a half-mile and the F-16s were
approaching the runway (the white star).
This can be done assuming the aircraft
were flying a path in line with the runway
and by looking at the background hills
for reference. As shown by the sight lines
from the two locations, If the UFO were
distant, as indicated by CEFAA, then the
position of the UFO would have been to
the right of the F-16s in the review stand
video. When one views that part of the
video, where the jets were in the same
approximate position, we do not see any
UFO cross behind or in front of the jets.
Since most of the data in this little exer-
cise is guesswork using some assump-
tions, it is possible the reason the UFO is
not visible is because of these assump-
tions. I only performed this exercise
as a demonstration on how the use of
multiple videos should have been used
to prove the exotic nature of the UFOs.
CEFAA apparently is unable to perform
such an exercise from the videos, which
means all of these videos are essentially
worthless.
Rinse, lather, repeat?
O riginally proclaimed as the video
that would scare skeptics, this case
rapidly unraveled into another embar-
rassment for UFOlogists once additional
information became available. Like the
Mexican AF FLIR video from 2004, the
analyses that were reportedly performed
seemed to be hidden from any critical re-
view. General Bermudez is the only per-
son who appears to have access to these
reports. However, it seems that his inter-
pretation of them is inaccurate based on
Dr. Dil’s communication with Dr. Barrera.
Either Bermudez misinterpreted Barrera’s
report or Dr. Barrera is trying to back out
of his analysis.

If Dr. Barrera was misquoted or misrepre-

sented by Bermudez, CEFAA appears as a
“Mickey Mouse” organization that is more
interested in promoting UFOs than trying
to scientifically analyze anything. When
you can’t get the facts right concerning
the analysis that was performed, then
the leader of this organization is either
incompetent or purposefully misleading
people. In either case, it demonstrates Google earth image (north is up) showing the approximate locations of two different videos of the same event. The sight lines show the F-16’s
that CEFAA is a waste of the Chilean gov- position which is marked with the white star(assumes the F-16s were flying in line with the runway - dark blue line). The yellow line is the path
of the UFO as implied by the CEFAA presentation slides. They only gave a general starting location with an arrow indicating the initial direction
ernment’s funds and is a failure as a scien- of flight (which was to the north but then reversed back to the path I present here). The estimated position of the UFO along this path at the
tific organization. time the F-16s were at their estimated position is marked by the yellow star. Positions for the videographers are estimates at best. It is interest-
ing that CEFAA with seven videos from seven locations chose not to present any triangulation maps in their arguments.

If you couple the incompetence/chica-

nery of CEFAA with the gullibility of Leslie
Kean and other UFO proponents, you are
going to have a prescription for a farce.
Will UFOlogists ever learn from their mis-
takes? Sixty years of this kind of pseudo-
scientific smoke and mirrors has shown
that they never will.

Notes and References
1. Boyle, Alan. “ Video from Chile stirs
up UFO buzz.” Cosmic log. March
15, 2012. Available WWW: http://
cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_
news/2012/03/15/10704801-video-
from-chile-stirs-up-ufo-buzz?lite
Frames from the two videographers at about the same time. While, we can not determine if this is the same exact instant (and it probably is not),
one can watch the 30FPS video (left) before and after this frame for the UFO that appears in the CEFAA video (right). No UFO can be seen.
ufo-vid_b_1424008.html
5. Cox, Billy. “Bugging CEFAA with ques-
tions”. DeVoid blog. March 27, 2012.
Available WWW: http://devoid.blogs.
heraldtribune.com/12908/bugging-
cefaa-with-questions/

2. Kean, Leslie. Facebook Comments. 6. Kean, Leslie and Ralph Blumenthal.

March 24, 2012. Available WWW:
https://www.facebook.com/les-
liekean
3. Kean, Leslie. Facebook Comments.
March 26, 2012. Available WWW:
https://www.facebook.com/les-
liekean
“UFO caught on tape over Santiago
air base.” Huffington Post. March 13,
2012. Available WWW: http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/leslie-kean/the-
extraordinary-ufo-sig_b_1342585.
html?ref=science&ir=Science

4. Kean, Leslie. “Update on Chilean UFO

Videos: Getting the Bugs Out.” Huff-
ington Post. April 13, 2012. Available
WWW: http://www.huffingtonpost.
com/leslie-kean/update-on-chilean-

34
W hile perusing through old issues of
Flying Saucer review, I stumbled
across an article by Dr. Berthold Eric
Schwarz with the title of “UFOs: Delusion
or Dilemma?” The same article appeared
in the October 1968 issue of Medical
Times. In that article was a case that had
a sketch, which Iooked eerily familiar (see
sketch to right).
For those who might not see what I am
talking about perhaps these sketches will
refresh their memories. They are sketches
by witnesses, who saw the Zond IV re-
entry.3
Photograph of the April 25, 1966 fireball taken by Utica teenager Dana DeGeorge. 1 It appeared in many of
the papers and Life Magazine. Compare it to the sketch below of the UFO that stopped a car at the same
time about 130 miles to the southwest in Towanda, PA.2
They are not alone. Jenny Randles put
the following sketches together for her
book “Danger in the air” revealing wit-
nesses interpretation of the Cosmos 1068
re-entry on December 31, 1978.4
The UFO story
T he description of events in Flying Sau-
cer Review reads:
...at 8:15 p.m. on April 25, 1966, while
driving with a friend, Charles Dayton, he
noticed a “very awesome, huge, flaming
body, which lit up a large area visible for
a few seconds. It had a red flame with a
green and yellow tail. The second view
was of a dark object. The huge flames
went out like turning off an electric bulb
for a few seconds. There was a dim light
in four port holes, and then all darkness. It
looked like it was 250 ft. in front of us and
250 ft. up, and it could go at terrific speed.
It was about 25 ft. in length and had a tail
35ft. long (see Fig. 3).
The contractor did not detect any odour,
but he recalled how warm he felt. He not-
ed that the automobile engine stalled and
the lights went out. He soon started the
engine again. “ I never saw such a sight.
Did a meteor really stop a car?
I was amazed and flabbergasted.” He and
his friend were concerned the object would
crash into the side of the mountain...5
This is quite an interesting story but the
sketch is just too similar to the Zond IV
and Cosmos 1068 sketches to be ignored
so I decided to check the newspaper ar-
chives and bluebook files to see what I
could find.
The source
I t did not take much searching to find a
source for the UFO. I am not sure how
much research Dr. Schwarz performed
but a cursory check of the media reports
on April 26, 1966 indicated a bright fire-
ball was visible all over the northeastern
United States on April 25, 1966 around
8:15 PM.
The reports received for this fireball are
most interesting. The duty officer at
Stewart AFB reported they initially re-
ceived reports that a plane had crashed,
which is common in many fireball sight-
ings. That description appeared in many
of the papers. One individual even stated
he saw two planes crash in mid-air. An-
other report to Stewart AFB had the wit-
nesses describing as “funnel-shaped”. In
Rhode Island, a woman reported that she
35
called Quonset Point Naval base and they
said they would send jets after it. Several
reports mirrored the Towanda drawing
by describing portholes in a larger craft.
One woman called the newspaper de-
manding they do something because
everyone at her location was frightened
by the event!
The amusing thing about this is that
many people were reported as being
skeptical of the meteor explanation. This
included a Utica teenager who managed
to photograph the fireball. 6
Like so many first time witnesses to these
events, they had no idea how bright and
slow a fireball can be.
This meteor was widely photographed.
The May 6th, 1966 edition of Life Maga-
zine published many of them. From
these photographs and films, a rough or-
bit was computed and published in the
Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society
of Canada (1968 Vol 62 p. 55). The data
indicates the object was a meteor and
not re-entering space debris.
Is it just a coincidence that a bright UFO,
that was described as a flaming object
that lit up the area, was seen at the same
time? It seems that this UFO and the fire-
ball were one in the same. Why the ve-
hicle and lights went out is hard to deter-
mine but I doubt that the meteor did it. I
can think of a couple of ways for a car to
stop and the lights to go dim without the
need of a UFO.
What is interesting is how this case was
interpreted by UFOlogists. For some rea-
son the fireball connection was ignored
or missed.
Contamination?
T rying to see if there was more infor-
mation about the case elsewhere, I
discovered that there was a brief men-
tion on NICAP’s 1966 UFO chronology
web page:
Night. As their car engine and headlights
failed and they felt heat, motorists saw a
UFO with four portholes hovering about
350 feet away, flames shooting off of it.7
Somehow the distance moved from
250 to 350 feet away and was hovering
instead of moving at terrific speed. Of
course, if it were “hovering”, it probably
would not be considered to be caused by
a meteor. However, the Schwarz article
never mentions any hovering so I pulled
the string on the source for this entry.
This entry came from Mark Rodeghier’s
“UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interfer-
ence: A Catalogue and Data Analysis”,
which should be expected to be accurate.
I found his catalogue and discovered the
same errors in distance and “hovering”
appearing in Rodeghier’s document so
one can not fault NICAP’s chronology.
Rodeghier cites as his source for this re-
port as being from John Keel’s book, “Op-
eration Trojan Horse”.
Now if I were an academic, I would think
that I would make sure that Keel had his
ducks in a row. Before opening Keel’s
book, I expected to see the same errors
found in the Rodeghier document. I was
shocked to see Keel describing some-
thing completely different:
On a highway near Towanda, Pennsylva-
nia, Robert W. Martz and a, friend saw the
object scoot overhead. Simultaneously,
their automobile engine stalled, and the
headlights went out. Both men com-
plained of feeling a wave of heat as they
watched “a very awesome, huge flaming
body which lit up a large area, visible for a
few seconds. Then the second view was of
a dark object. The huge flames went out
like turning off an electric bulb for a few
seconds . There was a dim light in four
portholes, and then all darkness. It looked
like it was 250 feet in front of us and 250
feet up, and it could go at terrific speed .“8
This sounds a lot like the original story
in Flying Saucer Review and there is no
mention of the UFO “hovering”. The fault
lay in Rodeghier’s interpretation of what
was written. Even more interesting is that
Keel was describing the event as being
suspected as a bright fireball. Didn’t Ro-
deghier bother to check this before put-
ting it into a UFO database that others
would cite as being thoroughly investi-
gated? It seems that Dr. Rodeghier may
not have researched this case very well.
If this one case was poorly researched,
what does it say for all of his other cases?
I am not stating that all in the database
should be dismissed but it demonstrates
that one should not blindly accept such
cases and databases as being vetted just
because it comes from one of UFOlogy’s
leading scientists.
What does this mean?
A side from the problem associated
with these sources not performing
due diligence in their research, what else
does this case tell us? The obvious one
comes from the sketches. Dr. Hartmann,
writing in the Condon report, suggested
the comparison between the Zond IV
sketches/reports and that of the Chiles-
Whitted sighting of 1947. If that was pro-
duced by a bright fireball, are there any
others that might be on the list as poten-
tial fireballs?
Drawings by Chiles and Whitted of their UFO en-
counter in July 1948. 9
36
Perhaps one can see similarities between
these sketches and two sketches by the
air crew in the Coyne helicopter-UFO
encounter. Phil Klass suggested it was
a bright fireball but that has been dis-
missed as a good explanation by UFOlo-
gists for various reasons. The sketches
are similar and makes one think twice
about the fireball explanation.
Sketches by Coyne and Yanacsek of their UFO10
Fireballs and re-entries redux
Does this mean that ALL cigar-shaped
UFOs are caused by meteors and re-en-
tering space debris? Absolutely not but
one has to give serious consideration for
such an explanation when one sees such
reports and drawings. The existence of
all sky meteor networks/cameras becom-
ing more widespread indicates that such
reports should be readily solved. Older
cases like Chiles-Whitted and Coyne are
more difficult to solve. The time of those
events were much later at night when
the public is less likely to be out. Ama-
teur astronomers do tend to fill the gap
when they are out observing. However,
if nobody was out observing that night,
it would not exist in the records. Without
a positive/negative report from experi-
enced meteor observers, who were in
a position to observe a fireball, one can
only suggest the possibility that a meteor
was the cause.
Notes and references
1. DeGeorge, Dana. “A meteor in full
view”. Life Magazine May 6, 1966.
Page 43.
2. Schwarz, Berthold Eric. “UFOs; Delu-
sion or Dilemma?” Flying Saucer Re-
view: Beyond Condon Special Issue
no. 2. Bowen, Charles ed. June 1969.
Page 49.
3. Klass, Philip. UFOS Explained. New
York: Random House, 1974.
4. Randles, Jenny. UFO! Danger in the
air. New York: Sterling Publishing Co.,
Inc. 1999.
5. Schwarz, Berthold Eric. “UFOs; Delu-
sion or Dilemma?” Flying Saucer Re-
view: Beyond Condon Special Issue
no. 2. Bowen, Charles ed. June 1969.
Page 49.
6. USAF Project Blue Book - UFO inves-
tigations. Fold 3 Web site. Available
WWW: http://www.fold3.com/im-
age/#7091568
7. National Investigations Commit-
tee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).
The 1966 UFO chronology. Avail-
able WWW: http://www.nicap.org/
waves/1966fullrep.htm
8. Keel, John A. Operation Trojan Horse.
Lilburn, Georgia: IllumiNet Press.
1996. Page 130.
9. United States Air Technical Intel-
ligence Center. Project Blue Book
Special Report NO. 14: Analysis of
Reports of Unidentified Aerial Ob-
jects. Project No. 10073. 5 May 1955.
Page 81.
10. Zeidman, Jennie. “A helicopter-UFO
encounter over Ohio”. The UFO
Engima. Peter Sturrock ed. New York:
Warner Books, Inc. 1999. Page 334.
POSTSCRIPT: It is interesting that I wrote
this article about a month before the
solution for the 1996 Yukon UFO event
was published. In that case, space debris
from the Cosmos 2335 rocket has been
identified as re-entering over the area
during the same time period as when
the UFO was reported by a great number
of the witnesses. One witness even gave
a sketch that was a reasonable match for
the calculated trajectory through the sky.
Witnesses described “port holes” or “rows
of lights” attached to a dark craft just like
Zond IV and Cosmos 1068 (these are not
the only cases). This demonstrates the
importance of learning from past case
histories and using them to look for po-
tential sources of UFO reports.
Fireball = UFO crash
I n mid-April, a story surfaced from Con-
necticut that a UFO had crashed into
Bantam Lake near Litchfield, Connecticut.
It had happened at 2AM on the 10th of
April and was seen by two people. A per-
son driving in Litchfield stated they saw a
large object, “the size of a whale” go into
the lake. A state trooper in nearby War-
ren, Ct. confirmed it by stating he saw a
UFO go down in the direction of the lake.
Firemen from the town of Morris cruised
the lake looking for any debris from a
crashed airplane but found nothing. As
always, this mystery seems unsolved to
the reporters.
For anybody that read the previous ar-
ticle and are familiar with how people
mistake bright fireballs to be crashing air-
craft (or UFOs), this story does not seem
that mysterious. I checked the American
Meteor Society’s database for the date in
question and, not surprisingly, saw the
following reports on April 10th.
Time Location Begin End Azimuth
Azimuth
01:30 Staten Island, 0 0
NY
01:42 Norwalk, Ct 206 146
The average magnitude of the two obser-
vations was -8, which is bright enough to
cast shadows and light up the sky. The
Norwalk, CT observer seemed to have
made more accurate/precise observa-
tions, while the Staten Island observer
gave generalities. The Norwalk observer
had it go from SSW to SE at a downward
angle. This is consistent with the obser-
vation of the state trooper who seems
to have seen the meteor go in an ESE.
The individual in Litchfield is harder to
determine but they could have seen it
from south to southwest depending on
where in Litchfield they were located. Be-
cause they were further north the fireball
would have disappeared much closer to
the horizon than the Norwalk observer.
It would have looked like the fireball had
gone down “just beyond the trees” and
into the lake. This type of misperception
is not unheard of in bright fireball re-
ports. In my opinion, this bright fireball
is what the two witnesses near Litchfield
probably saw.
37
“Experienced” amateur
astronomer photographs
UFO?
T he National UFO Reporting Center’s,
Peter Davenport listed this report in
his April UFO highlight cases. Amateur
astronomer reports always intrigue me
so I decided to take a look. The individ-
ual had photographed the Pleiades and
Venus for about two minutes using a
105mm lens and a fixed tripod. During
the photographs they did not notice any-
thing but when they examined them on
the computer, they saw a UFO (“an elon-
gated oval of nebulosity”) moving to-
wards the upper left on each successive
frame. They ruled out aircraft, satellites,
and lens artifacts. The object did not ap-
pear in another photograph the individ-
ual took of Orion so they concluded the
object was unidentified/exotic.
Any astrophotographer with experience
would have recognized what was re-
corded. Telephotos are made up of many
lenses that can cause internal reflections
with bright point sources. In this case,
the individual photographed an internal
reflection of Venus. Venus’ diurnal mo-
tion had it slowly drift to the lower right
of the camera’s field of view. The internal
reflection would move in the opposite
direction on each subsequent image (to
the upper left). The reason the image
of Orion did not show it was because
the stars in that image were not bright
enough to create this effect.
I would not consider this individual “ex-
perienced” if he could not figure out the
source of the image. I have seen many
images like this when using telephoto
lenses. This image below shows Venus on
April 29, 2012 using a 200mm telephoto
lens. The same “elongated oval of nebu-
losity” is visible in my image. It is clear
that Venus is producing this UFO in this
image as well as the one in the NUFORC
report.
R ecently, Stanton Friedman wrote an
article on The UFO Chronicles blog,
where he declared that I was an irratio-
nal, uninformed, ignorant debunker! This
had a lot to do with him reading a four-
year old article I wrote called “The UFO
disclosure myth”.
For some peculiar reason, Mr. Friedman
took offense at my portrayal of his “cos-
mic Watergate” story. Of course, he uses
the epithet of debunker to describe me.
I don’t mind being called a debunker
because, according to the dictionary, it
means that I am exposing false claims.
However, Mr. Friedman uses it as an ad
hominem. It is a UFOlogical insult meant
to demonize an individual. This is nothing
new for some UFOlogists and appears to
be standard operating procedure (SOP)
for Mr. Friedman. .
A broken record
I guess Mr. Friedman likes to repeat him-
self over and over again because his ar-
gument is pretty much the same thing he
has been repeating for some time. It is
almost as if that is all he has. These same
old arguments are:
• Project Blue Book SR-14 is the final
answer for everything involving UFO
statistics. They prove UFOs are real
and that a very significant percent-
age of UFO reports (over 20%) will
remain unexplained even after in-
vestigation.
• No matter what anyone else says,
certain MJ-12 documents are au-
thentic. Mr. Friedman offers no real
evidence to prove they are authentic
other than his own belief and some
flawed analysis by those who are not
independent of the UFO commu-
Flying Saucer
Fiziks II
nity. Skeptics are not the only ones
who think the MJ-12 documents are
frauds. Kevin Randle wrote a book
about it and Jerome Clark referred to
them as forgeries in the “hoaxes” sec-
•
tion of his UFO book.
The NSA documents still prove there
is a cover-up despite the fact that
Klass demonstrated a great many
of them, when declassified, demon-
strated they had more to do with
monitoring Soviet activities. Fried-
man’s argument is that just because
the documents don’t show any real
flying saucer cover-up doesn’t mean
the documents that are still marked
up are not part of the cover-up. This
is an argument from ignorance (no-
body has conclusively proven that
the documents do not involve a
cover-up involving alien spaceships,
therefore, there is a cover-up).
Sometimes, I think Stanton Friedman is
more interested in playing to the crowd
than actually performing research be-
38
yond what he believes. It is almost as if he
stops further research once he arrives at
the conclusion he desires. Isn’t that one
of his “rules for debunkers” - Research by
proclamation?
20% vs 10%
S peaking of research by proclamation,
Mr. Friedman takes exception with
the following statement I make on my
web site:
Even the most hardened UFOlogist (one
who studies the phenomena), who be-
lieves that there is something behind
these reports, will admit that at least nine
out of ten cases are misperceptions and
hoaxes. The values usually turn out to be
more like 3-10% of the reports remaining
unexplained.1
In reply, Friedman claims that this is a “ri-
diculous proclamation”. In response, he
whips out some statistics that state the
number is more like 20%. He cites three
documents that supports this claim.
Special Report 14
In SUNlite 3-4, I discussed the problems
with Project Blue Book’s Special Report
#14 (BBSR14). My main arguments were:
• The data, as stated by those conduct-
ing the study, was subjective. Any
conclusions drawn from the data
was going to be influenced by this
subjectivity. Even those that were
classified as “Excellent” UFO reports
had cases with “Insufficient Informa-
tion” (nine reports). How can a case
be described as “Excellent” if it has
“insufficient information”?
• Some of the cases were never actu-
ally investigated. They were simply
reports written some time after the
event and submitted for evaluation.
• The Battelle study did not perform
on site investigations of these cases
(something Friedman tries to imply).
It was purely an exercise from the
desk. They did the best they could
with the information they had at
their disposal but certain aspects of
the cases might have been missed
in determining a potential solution.
In fact, the group re-evaluated the
 434 unknowns and discovered that tell them? told years after the event. They
many of them did have potential ex- aren’t even “unknown” and should
planations. The 1964 NICAP report be labeled “insufficient information”.

• Out of the final 12 cases that were

determined to be the best, only five
can be found in the list of Blue Book
Unknowns. The remaining seven ap-
parently were never submitted for
investigation or were found to have
probable explanations. One of these
seven cases was the Chiles-Whitted
sighting that Condon study conclud-
ed was probably just a bright meteor
based on the results of the Zond IV
sightings. If over 50% of the best
cases had potential explanations or
were never investigated in the first
place, what does it say for the other
422 unknowns?
Friedman uses the Chi-Squared results to
bolster his claim but Allan Hendry point-
ed out that such an analysis was based
on factors that were subjective measure-
ments which were inadequate.
T o bolster his claim of high percent- 5.
ages of unknowns, Stanton Friedman
cites the NICAP UFO briefing document.
Several of the cases have potential
explanations offered or have been
accepted as being explained. An ex-
According to Friedman, 746 cases out of ample is the Mantell incident, which
4500 were listed as unexplained. How- some UFOlogists have accepted
ever, the NICAP UFO briefing document I as being just a skyhook balloon. If
read states the following in the abstract: the cases listed contains IFOs, then
there are probably other cases in
During the process of selecting the most the database that can be explained,
reliable and significant reports, emphasis which makes the final number of
was placed on the qualifications of the ob- “unknowns” in the list invalid.
server and on cases involving two or more
observers. This resulted in 746 reports be-
What this means is that using this data-
ing selected, after consideration of overbase as a statistic proving that the per-
5000 signed reports and many hundreds centage of unknowns was far greater
of reports from newspapers and other than 10% is an awkward attempt to de-
publications2 ceive people. Once again, Friedman has
executed one of the “rules of debunkers”
So where did he get 4500 reports when - What the public doesn’t know, I am not
the abstract states they selected 746 re- going to tell them!
ports out of OVER 5000 (Plus the many
hundreds of reports from other sources)? The Condon study

Finally, Mr. Friedman attempts to pad his

statistics by presenting numbers that best
support his position. The “all sightings”
category that Friedman cites included all
the reports filed. However, there were
two other categories determined by the
Battelle group. The first category was
the “unit sightings”, which combined the
reports received from additional observ-
ers to the same sighting from the same
location. As a result, the “Unit sightings”
reflected the actual number of individual
UFO events. However, after analyzing all
the reports, the Battelle study recognized
that there were some reports made of the
same event by independent observers at
different locations. As a result, they creat-
ed another category of “Object sightings”.
When conducting their analysis of the
data, Battelle used the “object sightings”
category and not the “all sightings” cate-
gories. Friedman apparently chooses the
“All sightings” category because the per-
centages of unknowns (21.5%) is greater
than the object sightings (19.7%).
The bottom line here is that Friedman
has chosen to use statistics from BBSR14
that support his position but chooses not
to inform his readers or audience “the
rest of the story”. Isn’t this another one
of Friedman’s “rules of debunkers” - What
the public doesn’t know, I am not going to
The selection of these 746 cases does not
seem to be based on anything more than
the cases were “reliable” and “significant”.
It does not state that they were investi-
gated and found “unexplained”. To use
them as a statistic of that kind is flawed.
I can point out other flaws with using this
document as this kind of statistic. Look-
ing at the 575 reports in section XI of the
document, we discover:
1. Some of these cases were simply
newspaper clippings. They were
never investigated at all, which is the
only reason they can be labeled “un-
known”.
2. 19 of the reports were radar sight-
ings with no visual confirmation.
They could easily have been simple
radar “angels” of some kind. The only
reason they are labeled unknown is
because no data was available for in-
vestigation.
3. 15 cases predated World War II and
another 15 were from World War II
and pre-1947. None of these cases
were ever investigated, which is why
they are labeled “unknown”.
4. Some cases had no date and were Finally, if we were to use Friedman’s ver-
M r. Friedman points out that 30% of
the Condon Study’s UFO investiga-
tions resulted in unexplained reports. It
is important to note that some of these
unexplained reports happened many
years before the Colorado project even
started and introduced memories of the
witnesses that were subject to error. Ex-
planations for these cases could not be
determined simply because of the pas-
sage of time and lack of documentation.
In the case of the Bentwater’s 1956 inci-
dent, recent investigations by British UFO
researchers revealed that certain aspects
of the case were exaggerated. Investi-
gation by Phil Klass (and documented
in SUNlite 4-1) also presented a reason-
able explanation for the RB-47 case. The
Trent photographs appear to be a hoax
and work by Robert Sheaffer resulted in
the investigator to reverse his conclusion!
Just because a case is unexplained does
not meant there is no reasonable expla-
nation
In other cases in the Condon report, po-
tential explanations were presented but
could not positively be made. This was
pointed out by Dr. Donald Menzel in his
book (co-authored with Ernest Taves),
“The UFO Engima”.

39
sion of BBSR14 statistics, we should add
the Zond IV incident into the report as a
case of 78 additional explained reports
and not just one explained event! This
would drop the number of unexplained
cases significantly.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
reviewed the Condon report and stated
the following:
The report recognizes that there remain
UFO sightings that are not easily ex-
plained. The report does suggest, how-
ever, so many reasonable and possible
directions in which an explanation may
eventually be found, that there seems to
be no reason to attribute them to an ex-
traterrestrial source without evidence that
is much more convincing. The report also
shows how difficult it is to apply scientific
methods to the occasional transient sight-
ings with any chance of success. 3
The fact that reasonable explanations ex-
ist for some of these “unexplained” case
have demonstrated that Condon and the
NAS were correct. Friedman is overplay-
ing his hand here. Science recognized it
was not always possible to produce final
explanations for all UFO reports but they
did recognize that many of these unex-
plained reports had potential explana-
tions that did not require the need for
“flying saucers” as a source. Again, Fried-
man is not telling people the entire truth
about what the report states.
My “ridiculous proclamation”
T he reason I gave no source for my
90% IFO value was because I thought
it was a generally accepted number (aka
common knowledge) in UFO circles. Ap-
parently, Mr. Friedman has a different
opinion, so I had to go recheck what
other UFO groups/UFOlogists stated to
make sure I got my facts right.
I first looked at the standard AF numbers.
Bluebook had a 5.6% unknown rate.
Now I realize that the USAF numbers are
not accepted by everyone so that value
might be ignored. However, Dr. Hynek
and the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS)
reevaluated the Bluebook numbers and
they determined that the percentage of
unknowns was 5.8%, which is not much
more different than the USAF numbers.
This falls between the 3-10% I originally
stated.
The next place I double checked were
the two major UFO organizations in the
United States. The Center for UFO Studies
(CUFOS) states the following:
The majority of sightings generally
prove to be misinterpretation of natural
phenomena...or man-made objects...A
smaller number of reports can not be in-
vestigated properly for various reasons-
lack of pertinent details, for example, or
inaccessibility of witnesses. However, in
any give number of UFO reports, about
5% to 10% are truly puzzling - not only
to the witness but also to those who in-
vestigate the reports and study the data.
These cases are considered true UFO re-
ports. (my emphasis in bold)4
As best I can tell that means the IFO rate
must be about 90-95%, which is consis-
tent with what I stated. Is it possible the
Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) had a dif-
ferent value? That answer would be.....
No:
In reality, well over 90 percent of all re-
ported UFOs prove to be IFOs - Identi-
fied Flying Objects - upon investigation.
IFOs can be anything from distant air-
plane landing lights to the planet Venus,
with ball lightning, weather balloons, and
other astronomical and meteorological
phenomena thrown in for good measure.
(my emphasis in bold)5
Once again, the IFO rate exceeds 90 per
cent, just as I stated.
Maybe other UFOlogists have different
values. The following has been stated by
British UFOlogist Timothy Good, who is
one of the more credulous personalities
in UFOlogy:
‘We know that up to 90 per cent of all UFO
reports can be explained in conventional
terms. However, I would say millions of
people worldwide have actually seen the
real thing.’6
A more conservative British UFOlogist is
Jenny Randles, who has written:
“If you don’t solve at least nine out of ten
cases you are doing something wrong” 7
This implies that she feels that 10% value
40
is fairly accurate.
In the early 1980s, Dr. Hynek told Tom
Snyder:
It turns out that some 90% of the raw re-
ports...we have a nationwide police net-
work an 800 number that the police use
and we get reports every night from police
departments from different parts of the
country...most of them are planets, twin-
kling stars.....The remaining 10%, those
are the ones we go after....8
I can also cite Allan Hendry’s own study
that he documented in his UFO hand-
book. In that analysis of data, he deter-
mined a rate of “unknowns” of 8.6% (113
out of 1307). This falls within my values
of 3-10%.
As for the bottom number of 3%, I based
that value on Allan Hendry’s evaluation
of his remaining 113 “unknowns”. He had
broken them down into several catego-
ries noting that some of these cases were
“near IFOs” or “problematic”. If these two
categories are taken away, the number
of “unknowns”, drops to 45 out of 1307
(3.4%).
I could list more sources but I think one
gets the picture here. Are all of these
UFOlogists “ridiculous” as well when
they use the same value that I gave? Did
they throw darts at a dartboard to come
up with their values? Why is it that Mr.
Friedman completely ignores what the
majority of UFOlogists state? Is he “unin-
formed”, “ignorant”, or is he just trying to
misinform people?
The rules for Friedman
In my opinion, Mr Friedman is violating
several rules of debunkers here:
1. He does not tell the public that all of
these UFO organizations state that
roughly 10% of all UFO reports are
unexplainable.
2. He chooses to ignore that fact for his
own cherry picked values. His mind
is made up.
3. He declares me to be ridiculous by
ignoring all the information that is
common knowledge showing that I
am correct. He is attacking the per-
 son, which is easy for somebody not
interested in looking at all the facts.
4. He makes proclamations by using
select numbers without researching
other values to see if that data may
be in error.
Stanton Friedman declares that only de-
bunkers follow these rules but, as one can
see, Stanton Friedman is probably one of
the biggest violators. Is this what he calls
a scientific approach to UFOs?
The narrow field of view myth
M r. Friedman once again commits the
same mistakes he claims that “de-
bunkers” perform in their investigations.
He proclaims that astronomers miss
UFOs because most are looking through
the narrow field of view of a telescope’s
eyepiece while they are out observing.
According to him, they set up their tele-
scope and immediately begin peering
into the eyepiece. They never look up or
do anything else. Such a description is
very inaccurate and is a comment made
by an individual, who seems to have not
bothered to look into this at all. He is just
repeating what he has heard from other
UFOlogists or what he believes to be the
case. I addressed the “narrow field of
view myth” in SUNlite 1-2 (page 13) but
will reiterate it again here.
Mr. Friedman obviously has never been
to an organized gathering of astrono-
mers or even a public viewing party. Very
few amateur astronomers are by them-
selves at observing sessions and, when
together, they tend to notice quite a bit.
With the increased number of observers
in a given location, the less likely it will
be that somebody will miss a transitory
event. Every year, there are mass group-
ings of amateur astronomers under dark
skies to observe the night sky. I have
been to a few over the years and I have
never heard of any alien spaceships be-
ing sighted during these events. Sure,
people have seen unusual events (I have
described many previously) but they all
could be explained.
Additionally, some astronomers do not
use telescopes. Meteor and satellite
observers rely mostly on their eyesight.
Others rely on binoculars for their obser-
vations. I can also point towards the re-
cent production of “all-sky” cameras and
meteor networks. How many UFOs that
defy explanation have these recorded?
I am aware that some cameras have re-
corded anomalous lights but they seem
to have potential explanations that do
not involve alien spaceships. Certainly,
one of these would record one of these
large craft that witnesses report.
Finally, in his argument, Mr. Friedman
seems to ignore his own BBSR14 sta-
tistics. He implies that UFO events are
very brief, meaning, while the observer is
looking through the eyepiece, he would
miss it. However, BBSR14 statistics show
that 47.6% of the “unknowns” had a du-
ration of over a minute (this value does
not include the 104 unknowns where
no duration was given). The longer the
UFO duration, the more likely it will be
seen as the observer looks away from the
eyepiece because of another BBSR14 sta-
tistic ignored by Friedman. The reported
brightness for these Unknowns (when a
value was given) indicated an object that
was very bright (like the moon or reflec-
tion of the sun off a bright surface). Any
bright object in a dark sky will draw an
astronomer’s attention even if he is look-
ing through the eyepiece because it will
create shadows/reflections/illumination
that will not be ignored. If Mr. Friedman
doubts this, I suggest he go to any star
party with a white flashlight and turn it
on. Even the astronomers gazing through
the eyepiece will respond in words that
will not be kind.
Finally, Mr Friedman ignores astronomers
that have seen UFOs and identified them.
My best example is Mitch Stanley. He was
the young amateur astronomer, who in
1997, saw the Arizona UFO V-formation
lights (not the 10PM event!) that passed
over Arizona through his telescope. He
identified them as planes in formation.
I discussed Friedman’s dismissal of this
explanation in SUNlite 1-3 (page 17). He
was apparently ignorant of Stanley’s ob-
servations or did not want his readers to
be aware of them. In either case he com-
mitted one of the sins he proclaims that
”debunkers” always commit (research by
proclamation or don’t tell the public).
What Friedman is doing here is making
proclamations about astronomers with-
out doing any research on the subject. Is
this any surprise?
41
Stacking cow pies
I n my article I stated that UFOlogy has
made no progress and has not present-
ed any significant data that shows UFO
reports are caused by alien spaceships.
Friedman fires back,
The question isn’t whether all UFOs are
spaceships, but whether any are. Because
most people are not 7’ tall doesn’t mean
nobody is. 9
This analogy is a poor one. There is evi-
dence that people are 7 feet tall. How-
ever, he should have used a height of
twenty feet. That is more in line with the
theory that alien spaceships are visiting
earth. LIke UFOs being alien spaceships,
there are no cases that people are twen-
ty feet tall unless you believe in myths
about giants.
As support for his claim that there are
some UFO reports that were created by
alien spaceships, he states that there
are “thousands” of physical trace cases,
“many” radar-visual cases, and “best ab-
duction” cases that demonstrate there
are alien spaceships operating in Earth’s
atmosphere. How many of these “physi-
cal trace cases” have been proven to
be Extraterrestrial in origin? How many
radar-visual cases have been proven to
be Extraterrestrial in origin? Has a single
abduction case been proven to involve
aliens? The answer to those questions is
NONE! What he is doing is piling a whole
bunch of unknown cases that don’t prove
anything by themselves hoping that the
shear weight of inconclusive evidence
will establish strong evidence. This is like
multiplying 0 by a million. You still get
“0”. However, I like Brian Dunning’s anal-
ogy better:
...you can stack cowpies as high as you
want, but they won’t turn into a bar of
gold. Good evidence is composed of good
evidence, not lots of bad evidence.10
A debate challenge?
F riedman states he is going to expose
my noisy negativism and would de-
bate me anywhere. He adds that I am
afraid to take him on in such a debate
even though he never contacted me to
know my answer. In fact, I don’t ever re-
call him contacting me once in the fifteen
years that I have had my web site on the
internet. Is this another case of declaring
something is true without any research?
To be honest, I see no reason to debate
Mr. Friedman under the conditions he
is familiar with. He apparently desires a
public debate on a live radio or television
setting, where he can grandstand for an
audience that will believe him no mat-
ter what he states. If Stanton Friedman
truly desires a serious debate, I suggest
he set up the debate under formal rules
and moderated by a panel independent
of the UFO field. I also suggest it be con-
fined to one specific case or just a few
select cases and not generalities that are
ambiguous or open to interpretation.
Of course, I need to be compensated for
my time and effort. If he so badly wants
such a debate, it is up to him to plan and
finance it. The ball is in his court.
Promoting proves nothing
M r. Friedman wants everyone to ac-
cept his version that some UFOs
are alien spaceships visiting earth. The
truth of the matter is that he has failed to
convince any scientific body outside of
UFOlogy that this is true. Stanton Fried-
man can complain, demonize, sensation-
alize, and scream all he wants but he is
just trying to divert attention away from
this fact. He blames everyone from the
US Government to “debunkers” like me
for his failure. As Seth Shostak recently
stated:
The fact is, if you’re certain that our planet
is hosting alien visitors, the way to gain
acceptance for your point of view is to
prove it, not insist that the problem lies
with third parties. The blame game is a
cop-out.1
The evidence should speak for itself. Un-
fortunately, it is telling a story Stanton
Friedman does not want people to hear.
Notes and references
1. Printy, Timothy. My skeptical opinion
about UFOs. Available WWW: http://
home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/
UFO.htm
2. Hall, Richard ed. The UFO Evidence.
1964. New York: National Investiga-
tions Committee on Aerial Phenom-
ena (NICAP). Available WWW: http://
www.nicap.org/ufoe/UFO%20Evi-
dence%201964.pdf . p. i.
3. Condon, E. U., et al., eds. Scientific
Study of Unidentified Flying Objects.
New York: Bantam 1968. p. viii
4. The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS).
Hynek Classification system. Avail-
able WWW: http://www.cufos.org/
HynekClass.html
5. Stacy, Dennis. What is UFOlogy? Mu-
tual UFO Network (MUFON) web site.
Available WWW:http://www.mufon.
com/FAQs.html
6. “President Eisenhower Supposedly
Had Three Secret Meetings With
Aliens.” Phantoms and Monsters
blog. February 14, 2012. Available
WWW: http://naturalplane.blogspot.
com/2012/02/president-eisenhow-
er-supposedly-had.html
7. Evans, Hilary and Dennis Stacy ed.
UFO: 1947-1997: Fifty Years of Flying
Saucers. London: John Brown Pub-
lishing Ltd., 1997. P. 248
8. “Tom Snyder interviewing J. Allen
Hynek and Peter Gersten.” Youtube.
Available WWW: http://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=unAR5UE8sjc&f
eature=youtu.be
9. Friedman, Stanton. “UFO Debunkers:
Irrational, uninformed, and ignorant.”
UFO Chronicles blog. March 29, 2012.
Available WWW: http://www.theufo-
chronicles.com/2012/03/debunkers-
irrational-uninformed-and.html
10. Dunning, Brian. “The top UFO de-
bunker? Really?”Skepticblog. Decem-
ber 18, 2008. Available WWW: http://
www.skepticblog.org/2008/12/18/
the-top-ufo-debunker-really/
11. Shostak, Seth. “The UFO Bestiary”.
Huffington Post. April 27, 2012.
Available WWW: http://www.huff-
ingtonpost.com/seth-shostak/ufo-
sightings_b_1458904.html
42
NASA Produces
some UFO reports
O ne of the more obscure NASA launch
locations is the Wallops Island flight
facility on the eastern shore of the Del-
mar Peninsula. On March 27th, NASA
launched what they called the “Anoma-
lous transport rocket experiment”(ATREX)
about 5AM local time. The experiment
involved launching five different rockets
into the upper atmosphere, 80 seconds
apart, to different altitudes. When they
reached their required altitude, they re-
leased trimethyl aluminum (TMA), which
produced milky white clouds that could
be used to evaluated the upper atmo-
sphere. As always, these events are spec-
tacular and were seen over a wide area
from the Carolinas to New England. De-
spite being launched early in the morn-
ing, there were a few UFO reports in the
MUFON database.
Two of the more accurate reports came
from Wilmington, PA and Johnston,
Rhode Island. Both observers were pret-
ty accurate in their observations. How-
ever, two of the reports were tainted
by the witness’ excitement. The first of
these was from Katonah, NY. This indi-
vidual was driving south on 684 south-
bound, when they noticed two balls of
light leaving clouds behind. The lights
were reported moving erratically and
performed some sort of “dance”. They re-
ported being “terrified” by the event. The
observer in Newville, PA was the other re-
port that was influenced by the witness’
emotion. According to that report, the
lights changed directions several times.
The individual reported they were scared
and rushed home.
I hope that MUFON investigators identify
these reports for the witnesses. It is in-
teresting that two of the four reports in-
volved emotional reports that could be
hard to explain if the investigators take
the witnesses description at face value
and are unaware of the ATREX test.
 UFOs on the tube
NASA: The Unexplained Files
T he latest installment of UFO programs
from the Science Channel was an-
other unimpressive effort. A great num-
ber of important points were omitted,
overlooked, or ignored for some of these
cases, which misled the viewer that there
were alien spaceships watching our ef-
forts in space.
The show started with the “fireflies”
around Friendship 7. Bruce Bleakley, the
director of the Frontiers of Flight mu-
seum, stated that nobody ever was able
to figure them out, which really is not
correct. I thought it was always under-
stood they were just ice particles around
the capsule. Scott Carpenter, in the pro-
gram “Spaceflight”, stated he figured it
out when he could bang on the capsule
and see the particles come flying off the
capsule. Eventually, Story Musgrave was
presented and he stated they were prob-
ably ice particles. The show grudgingly
admitted that “most experts” agree with
this solution. Other than Bleakley, is there
anybody else with a different answer?
The program then moved on to the Gem-
ini missions. The Gemini 4 mission with
McDivitt taking some film of an unidenti-
fied object was discussed at length. James
Oberg suggested it may have been a clas-
sified payload. Nick Pope, who never met
a UFO he did not like, got to stick his face
into the program stating there was a dis-
crepancy between what McDivitt says he
saw and what NORAD said it was. There
was some suggestion that the film he ex-
posed had been stolen, doctored, or was
missing. However, McDivitt would tell Dr.
Roach of the Condon study that it prob-
ably was an unnamed satellite.
Gemini 7’s “bogey” story was described
next. Strangely, Frank Borman’s state-
ments about this were missing. Borman
told a reporter for air and space magazine
in 1998, that he was approached by “Un-
solved Mysteries” for a description of this
event. Borman responded he would love
to come on the air and clear the mystery
up and promptly told the producer that
they were not UFOs but were simply the
describing the booster or part of it. The
producer declined having him on the
show.
Other mission “bogeys” were mentioned.
The Gemini 11 UFO was presented. Dr.
Maccabee said it could not have been
the Proton 3 rocket based on the or-
bital data. I did not see it mentioned
but Oberg states that it was suggested
by Brad Sparks that it probably was the
space walk equipment package that had
been jettisoned a few hours before.
The Apollo 11 UFO was brought up as
well but that seems to be nothing more
than an SLA panel from the S-IVB. Pete
Conrad mentioned seeing something
similar on his mission on Apollo 12 in the
NOVA program “The case for the UFOs”.
This did not stop the producers from hav-
ing Pope suggest that astronauts don’t
talk about UFOs because they are under
orders from the government. Pete Con-
rad stated he was never told to lie about
UFOs in the NOVA program.
The highly promoted Skylab 3 case was
mentioned as well. The size was estimat-
ed at 100 meters by Dr. Maccabee based
on the photographic images. One image
shows a squiggle while the others show
point sources. The squiggle was prob-
ably due to the vibration of the camera.
Even at 1/250th of a second (the expo-
sure time suggested in the program)
some vibration can be induced. I am
unimpressed by this UFO as it acted like
space debris or a satellite.
The space shuttle videos were all men-
tioned. This gets to be a tired discussion
back and forth between Dr. Kasher and
James Oberg for the STS-48 video, which
are probably nothing more than ice par-
ticles. The STS-75 tether, STS-80, and
STS-115 videos were debunked by MU-
FON’s Marc D’Antonio.
Overall the program tried to cram too
much into one hour and the presenta-
tion was far too one-sided. I was sur-
prised they included D’Antonio’s de-
bunking of some of the videos. The
producers should have just focused on
closely examining a few good cases in-
stead of briefly discussing events that
have reasonable explanations.
43
Book Reviews
Buy it! (No UFO library should do
without it)
UFO!: Danger in the air - Jenny
Randles
This book came out in 1998 and covered
some good ground. Her discussion of
many cases involving aircraft and her rec-
ognition of problems with meteors, space
debris re-entries, and false radar contacts
was refreshing compared to most UFO
books. While I disagree with some of her
conclusions, I find the book well written
and willing to explore possibilities other
than the ET explanation.
Borrow it. (Worth checking out of
library or borrowing from a friend)
Project SIGN Air Force documents
1948-1949 - edited by Richard Hall
(FUFOR)
This is a great book if you want to look
at all the project SIGN documents in one
collection. I particularly enjoy reading
the memos in late 1948, where Colonel
McCoy was being pushed to resolve the
issue from above and was sending all
sorts of memos out asking the various
agencies if they have any answers. Be-
fore the internet became populated with
such documents, I found this a valuable
resource. Now it collects dust on my
shelf because I have electronic copies of
all them from elsewhere.
Bin it! (Not worth the paper it is
written upon - send to recycle bin)
The UFO conspiracy - Jenny Ran-
dles
I was disappointed in this book when I
bought this book in a used book store
about a decade ago. Randles spent the
first section of the book trying to list the
Mantell, Chiles-Whitted, and Gorman
cases as “unexplained”. It is interesting
to also see her defend the Rendlesham
forest case and compare the arguments
she presented about the lighthouse with
her more recent published opinions.
The book was written in 1987 and is out
of date. It offers very little other than a
glimpse into her opinions at that time.